Stuart Russell is a professor, and former chair, of electrical engineering and computer sciences and holds the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley.

He received his BA with first-class honours in physics from Oxford in 1982 and his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford in 1986. He is a fellow of AAAI, ACM, and AAAS; winner of the Computers and Thought Award and the ACM Karl Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award; and holder from 2012 to 2014 of the Chaire Blaise Pascal and ANR senior Chaire d’excellence in Paris.

His book ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach’ (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI; it has been translated into 13 languages and is used in over 1300 universities in 116 countries. His research covers many areas of artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on machine learning, probabilistic modeling and inference, theoretical foundations of rationality, and planning under uncertainty. He also works for the United Nations, developing a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty. His current concerns include the threat of autonomous weapons and the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity.