Richard Mallah

Richard Mallah is Technical AI Consultant at The Future of Life Institute, where he does metaresearch, analysis, advocacy, strategy, and field building regarding technical, strategy, and policy aspects of transformative AI safety. From December 2015 Richard was on the founding team of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems and continues to serve on its Executive Committee. He co-chairs the recurring SafeAI and AISafety technical safety workshops at AAAI and IJCAI, and in 2021 was the Executive Director of the Consortium on the Landscape of AI Safety, for which he was drafted because of his AI safety field landscaping & synthesis work at FLI. Richard has served in the Safety and the Labor & Economy Working Groups at Partnership on AI, is an advisor to The Future Society, and is an Honorary Senior Fellow at the Foresight Institute. Mr. Mallah has been working in machine learning and AI in industry for over twenty years, spanning many roles across R&D including algorithms research, research management, product team management, CTO, chief scientist, and strategy consulting; in total he’s worked on over a hundred AI/ML-related technical projects from these different perspectives. Ever-focused on innovation yet mindful of managing risks, Richard has regularly aligned applied research drivers with novel research directions in trustworthy AI. On the applications side, heading enterprise risk management systems at the world’s largest asset manager during the financial crisis lent appreciation for the interplay among systemic tail risks, technology, multiscale foresight, and risk reduction. Richard advises AI safety startups, VC funds, incubators, academics, governments, international multistakeholder bodies, and NGOs on trustworthy AI, scalable AI safety, scalable AI ethics, wide-angle sustainability, ML model risk management, complexity management, strategy, and assurance. He holds a degree in Computer Science with a specialization in Intelligent Systems from Columbia University.