Stuart Jonathan Russell OBE FRS was born in 1962. He is a British computer scientist who has made important contributions to the field of artificial intelligence (AI). He is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2008 to 2011, he was a part-time professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. He holds the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley. Russell started and leads the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) at UC Berkeley. He also founded the International Association for Safe and Ethical Artificial Intelligence (IASEAI). Russell worked with Peter Norvig to write the important textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which is used by over 1,500 universities in 135 countries.
Education and early life
Russell was born in Portsmouth, England. He attended St. Paul's School in London. He studied physics at Wadham College, Oxford, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree with top honors in 1982. In 1986, he moved to the United States to earn a PhD in computer science at Stanford University. His research focused on reasoning based on patterns and comparisons. His PhD advisor was Michael Genesereth. The PhD was supported by a scholarship from NATO, provided by the UK Science and Engineering Research Council.
Career and research
He joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley as a professor of computer science. From 2008 to 2011, he also worked as a part-time professor of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, where he studied how computers can help understand the body and improve care in hospitals. He is also an Honorary Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. His research in artificial intelligence includes work on teaching computers to learn, make decisions, understand knowledge, plan, track multiple objects, see images, and learn from examples. He has also helped lead efforts to stop the creation and use of weapons that operate without human control.
In 2016, he started the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence at UC Berkeley with other main researchers, including Pieter Abbeel, Anca Dragan, Tom Griffiths, Bart Selman, Joseph Halpern, Michael Wellman, and Satinder Singh Baveja. Russell has written many articles and books, including The Use of Knowledge in Analogy and Induction and Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited Rationality (with Eric Wefald). He and Peter Norvig wrote Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, a textbook used by more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries. He serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Future of Life Institute and the advisory board of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
In 2017, he worked with the Future of Life Institute to create a video called Slaughterbots, which showed how groups of drones could be used to harm people. He shared this video with a United Nations meeting about rules for weapons.
In 2018, he gave an interview for the documentary Do You Trust This Computer?
His book, Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, was published by Viking on October 8, 2019. His work focuses on making artificial intelligence safe and useful for people. His former doctoral students include Marie desJardins, Eric Xing, and Shlomo Zilberstein.
Russell gave the 2021 Reith Lectures, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, about living with artificial intelligence. The lectures covered topics such as "The Biggest Event in Human History," "AI in warfare," "AI in the economy," and "AI: A Future for Humans."
In March 2023, Russell signed an open letter from the Future of Life Institute asking all AI labs to stop training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months. Over 30,000 people, including AI researchers like Yoshua Bengio and Gary Marcus, signed the letter. In a January 2025 article in Newsweek, Russell wrote, "In other words, the AGI race is a race towards the edge of a cliff."
Awards and honors
In 1995, Russell shared the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award at the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, which is the most important international award in AI for researchers under 35. In 2022, he received the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence, becoming only the second person (after Hector Levesque) to win both of IJCAI's major research awards. He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), elected in 1997, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), elected in 2003, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, elected in 2011. In 2005, he was given the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. In 2012, he was appointed to the Blaise Pascal Chair in Paris, which honors internationally recognized foreign scientists in all fields, and to the senior Chaire d'excellence by France's Agence Nationale de la Recherche.
Russell served as vice chair of the World Economic Forum's Council on AI and Robotics and is currently a member of its Global AI Council. Other awards he has received include the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator Award, the World Technology Award, the Mitchell Prize, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Outstanding Educator Award. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2021 Birthday Honours for his work in AI research.
In 2025, Russell was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. He was also elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2025.