Research Director of Frontier AI Taskforce

Associate Professor of Machine Learning Yarin Gal has been appointed as the Research Director of a new government Frontier AI Taskforce.

The Taskforce is a start-up inside government, which aims to build an AI research team that can evaluate risk at the frontier of AI.

As AI systems become more capable, they may significantly augment risks and the government has recognised that to manage this risk technical evaluations are critical - and these need to be developed by a neutral third party.

As the Taskforce’s first progress report explains, Yarin’s appointment reflects his status as ‘a globally recognised leader in Machine Learning’. Here in Oxford, he leads the Oxford Applied and Theoretical Machine Learning Group, and his ground-breaking work on Bayesian deep learning led MIT Technology Review to name him as one of the winners of Innovators Under 35 Europe in 2019.