Adam Tauman Kalai
I am a researcher at OpenAI working on safe and ethical AI under Lilian Weng. Previously, I worked at Microsoft Research New England (Cambridge, MA) from its founding in 2008 to 2023 on various fun problems including Code Generation (getting computers to write programs), Fairness, Algorithms, Translating Whale Communication, Game Theory, Computer Humor, Crowdsourcing, and many other things. Before that, I served as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Georgia Tech and TTI-Chicago.
To see what I’ve been up to recently, watch a video of some work on Language Models presented at DIMACS Workshop on Foundation Models, Large Language Models, and Game Theory in October, 2023. Also, see an information-theoretic explanation of why LLMs hallucinate.
I’ve chaired and co-chaired a number of conferences and meetings including NEML (New England Machine Learning Day), HCOMP (Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing), and COLT (Conference on Learning Theory).
Previous students/interns: Jake Abernethy (Berkeley→Georgia Tech), Gati Aher (Olin College→CMU), Daniel Alabi (Harvard), Ken Arnold (Harvard), Maria De-Arteaga (CMU→UT Austin), Pranjal Awasthi (CMU→Google), Nina Balcan (CMU→CMU), Harry Bovik (CMU→CMU), Matthew Bowers (MIT), Danielle Bragg (UW→MSR), Elisa Celis (UW→Yale), Myra Cheng (Caltech→Stanford), Konstantina Christakopoulou (UMN→Google), Brittany Fiore-Gartland (UW→Tableau), Abie Flaxman (CMU→UW), Tom Heffernan (Shrewsbury HS→Colorado College), Varun Kanade (Georgia Tech→Oxford), Ashwin Kalyan (Georgia Tech→Allen AI), Linyi Li (UIUC), Katrina Ligett (CMU→Caltech), Azarakhsh Malekian (UMD→Toronto), Brendan McMahan (CMU→Google), Aditya Menon (UCSD→Google), Ankur Moitra (MIT→MIT), Claire Monteleoni (MIT→Colorado), Peter Organisciak (UIUC→Denver), Alexey Romanov (UMASS Lowell→Microsoft), Aaron Roth (CMU→UPenn), Tal Schuster (MIT→Google), Nathaniel Swinger (Lexington HS→UW), Omer Tamuz (Weizmann→Caltech), Jason Tsay (CMU→IBM), Shubham Tulsiani (IIT→CMU), Duru Turkoglu (U. Chicago→DePaul), Shyam Upadhyay (UIUC→Google), Greg Valiant (Berkeley→Stanford), Sofia Vempala (Midtown HS), Elad Verbin (Tel Aviv University→Lunar), Ellen Vitercik (CMU→Stanford), Allison Wang (Mission San Jose HS), Shih-Yu Wang (MIT), Miaomiao Wen (CMU→Coursera), Gabriel Wickline, and Kuat Yessenov (MIT→Google).
Spring 2008: Game Theory and Computer Science, (Georgia Tech)
Fall 2006: Machine Learning Theory (Weizmann Institute)
Autumn 2004: Online Algorithms (University of Chicago)
I’m also co-founder of majulook.
Adam Tauman Kalai is a Member of Technical Staff and Research Scientist at OpenAI working on AI Safety and Ethics. He is quite old and has worked in multiple fields, including Algorithms, Fairness, Machine Learning Theory, Game Theory, and Crowdsourcing. He received his BA from Harvard and PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. He has served as an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech and the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. He is a member of the science team of Project CETI, an interdisciplinary initiative to understand the communication of sperm whales. He has co-chaired AI and crowdsourcing conferences including COLT (the Conference on Learning Theory), HCOMP (the Conference on Human Computation) and NEML. His honors include the Majulook prize, best paper awards, an NSF CAREER award, and an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship.
You can contact me at (the middle four letters of macadamias) @kal.ai