Stuart J. Russell

Research Areas

Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Control, Intelligent Systems, and Robotics (CIR)
Biosystems & Computational Biology (BIO)
machine learning; real-time decision-making; algorithms; probabilistic reasoning; computational biology

Research Centers

Teaching Schedule

Fall 2025

CS 294-166. Foundations for Beneficial AI, TuTh 12:30-13:59, Etcheverry 3109

Biography

Stuart Russell received his B.A. with first-class honours in physics from Oxford University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford in 1986. He then joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he is Professor (and formerly Chair) of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering. He is co-chair of the World Economic Forum Council on AI and the OECD Expert Group on AI Futures, and he is a US representative to the Global Partnership on AI.

From 2011 to 2014 he also served as an Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at UC San Francisco.

Russell is a recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the ACM Allen Newell Award, the AAAI Feigenbaum Prize, the World Technology Award (Policy category), the Mitchell Prize of the American Statistical Association and the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, and the AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator Award. In 1998, he gave the Forsythe Memorial Lectures at Stanford University and from 2012 to 2014 he held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris. In 2021 he received an OBE from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and gave the BBC Reith Lectures. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, an AI2050 Senior Fellow, and a Fellow of AAAI, ACM, and AAAS.

His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, computational physiology, global seismic monitoring, and philosophical foundations. His textbook "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (with Peter Norvig) is used in over 1,500 universities in 135 countries. His current

concerns include the threat of autonomous weapons and the long-term

future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity. The latter topic is the subject of his book, "Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control".

Education

1986, PhD, Computer Science, Stanford University
1982, BA Hons (1st class), Physics, Oxford University

Selected Publications

B. Milch, B. Marthi, S. J. Russell, D. Sontag, D. L. Ong, and A. Kolobov, "BLOG: Probabilistic models with unknown objects," in Proc. 19th Intl. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2005), L. Pack Kaelbling and A. Saffiotti, Eds., Rochester Hills, MI: IJCAI, Inc., 2005, pp. 1352-1359.
D. Andre and S. J. Russell, "Programmable reinforcement learning agents," in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 13: Proc. 14th Annual Conf. (NIPS 2000), T. K. Leen, T. G. Dietterich, and V. Tresp, Eds., Bradford Books, Vol. 13, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001, pp. 1019-1025.
T. Huang and S. J. Russell, "Object identification: A Bayesian analysis with application to traffic surveillance," Artificial Intelligence: Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence 40 Years Later, vol. 103, no. 1-2, pp. 77-93, Aug. 1998.
S. J. Russell, "Rationality and intelligence," Artificial Intelligence: Special Issue on Economic Principles of Multi-Agent Systems, vol. 94, no. 1-2, pp. 57-77, July 1997.
S. J. Russell and E. Wefald, "Principles of metareasoning," Artificial Intelligence, vol. 49, no. 1-3, pp. 361-395, May 1991.