Meredith Whittaker is the Minderoo Research Professor at New York University and the founder of Google’s Open Research group and co-founder of the AI Now Institute.

Her research and advocacy focus on the social implications of artificial intelligence and the tech industry responsible for it, with a particular emphasis on power and the political economy driving the commercialization of computational technology. Prior to NYU, she worked at Google for over a decade, where she led product and engineering teams, founded Google’s Open Research Group, and co-founded M-Lab, a globally distributed network measurement platform that now provides the world’s largest source of open data on internet performance. She also worked extensively on issues of privacy and security, helping provide funding, strategy, and support for efforts dedicated to providing privacy from governments and large tech corporations. As a long-time tech worker, she also helped lead labor organizing at Google.

She was one of the core organizers pushing back against Google’s military contracts, the company’s insufficient response to concerns about AI and its harms, and was a central organizer of the Google Walkout. She continues to work in solidarity with organizers in tech, driven by the belief that worker power and collective action are necessary to ensure meaningful tech accountability, especially in the context of concentrated industrial power. She has advised the White House, the FCC, the City of New York, the European Parliament, and many other governments and civil society organizations on artificial intelligence, internet policy, measurement, privacy, and security.

Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. He is a recipient of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award and from 2012 to 2014 held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

His book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI, used in 1500 universities in 135 countries. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity. He has developed a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty and is currently working to ban lethal autonomous weapons.