Research Program
Resident Researchers
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Research Fellow
Eliezer Yudkowsky is a foremost researcher on Friendly AI and recursive self-improvement. He created the Friendly AI approach to AGI, which emphasizes the importance of the structure of an ethical optimization process and its supergoal, in contrast to the common trend of seeking the right fixed enumeration of ethical rules a moral agent should follow. In 2001, he published the first technical analysis of motivationally stable goal systems, with his book-length Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures. In 2002, he wrote "Levels of Organization in General Intelligence," a paper on the evolutionary psychology of human general intelligence, published in the edited volume Artificial General Intelligence (Springer, 2006). He has two papers in the edited volume Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford, 2008), "Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks" and "AI as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk."
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Research Fellow
Anna Salamon is a full-time SIAI researcher who leads the 2009 SIAI Visiting Fellows Program. She joined SIAI in 2008, working on the Uncertain Future web project, a probabilistic model of future possibilities in AI, cognitive enhancement, and catastrophic risk. Ms. Salamon holds a degree in mathematics from UC Santa Barbara and a degree in Great Books from St. John's College. She has worked for two years in applied mathematics for a variety of institutions, including research at NASA Ames into the foundations of machine learning. At the Singularity Summit 2009, she gave two talks on SIAI's mission and views.
Email: anna.salamon(at)singinst(dot)org
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Research Fellow
Steve Rayhawk is a full-time SIAI researcher who is interested in applying computational Bayesian decision theory to problems in technological forecasting, risk management policy, and social epistemology. He holds a degree from the mathematics program of the UC Santa Barbara College of Creative Studies. Before joining SIAI, he worked for four years at San Diego State University on statistical methods for the application of high-throughput bioinformatics to microbial ecology. He is working on identifying and projecting the development of technologies relevant to Singularity scenarios.
Email: steve.rayhawk(at)singinst(dot)org