Peta Masters

UK Intelligence Community Postoctoral Research Fellow
King's College London

I specialise in deceptive AI systems. 

My background is in the arts - I trained as an actor at RADA and performed and wrote for TV and theatre before segueing into IT, computer science and academia. 

I got my doctorate at RMIT in Melbourne with a thesis on goal recognition and deception in path-planning. My first paper - with supervisor, Sebastian Sardina - won the Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Award at AAMAS17.

I worked on deceptive AI at the University of Melbourne with a multi-disciplinary team under the direction of Wally Smith, a psychologist and magician. At King's, I have been part of Luc Moreau's TAS (Trustworthy Autonomous Systems) Hub, building on my understanding of why and how people come to trust - and, all too often and easily, overtrust - autonomous and artificially intelligent systems.

I have recently been awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering fellowship to investigate how AI can be used to identify - and mitigate - deceptive behaviour.