Zico Kotler: New Board of Director in OpenAI
Strengthening Governance with AI Safety and Alignment Expertise Zico Kolter Joins the Safety & Security
Committee OpenAI has announced the appointment of Zico Kolter to its Board of Directors. Zico, a professor and Director of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, brings extensive expertise in AI safety, alignment, and the robustness of machine learning classifiers. His research spans new deep network architectures, innovative methodologies for understanding the influence of data on models, and automated methods for evaluating AI model robustness. This makes him an invaluable technical director for OpenAI's governance.
Zico will also join the Board’s Safety and Security Committee, working alongside directors Bret Taylor, Adam D’Angelo, Paul Nakasone, Nicole Seligman, and Sam Altman (CEO), as well as other OpenAI technical experts. The committee is tasked with making recommendations on critical safety and security decisions for all OpenAI projects.
In welcoming Zico to the board, Bret Taylor, Chairman of the Board, stated, “Zico adds deep technical understanding and perspective in AI safety and robustness that will help us ensure general artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.”
Who is Zico Kotler ?
Credit:Internet
Zico Kolter, a renowned Professor of Computer Science and head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, has been a pivotal figure in the AI and machine learning landscape for over 12 years. After earning his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 2010, he continued to advance his expertise through a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT from 2010 to 2012. Zico has authored numerous award-winning papers, making significant contributions to top conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, and AISTATS.
His groundbreaking research has led to the development of the first methods for creating deep learning models with guaranteed robustness. Zico pioneered the integration of hard constraints into AI models by embedding classical optimization techniques within neural network layers. In 2023, his team introduced innovative approaches to automatically assess the safety of large language models (LLMs), showcasing the potential to bypass existing safeguards using advanced optimization methods.
Beyond academia, Zico has actively engaged with the industry, serving as the former Chief Data Scientist at C3.ai. He currently holds influential roles as Chief Expert at Bosch and Chief Technical Advisor at Gray Swan, a startup focused on AI safety and security. His work continues to push the boundaries of AI, ensuring the robustness and safety of machine learning models in both academic and industrial settings.
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