Adam Tauman Kalai

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About

I am a researcher at OpenAI working on safe and ethical AI under Alex Beutel. 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).

Students & Teaching

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.

Short Biography

Adam Tauman Kalai is a Research Scientist at OpenAI, specializing in AI Safety and Ethics. His research spans algorithms, fairness, machine learning theory, game theory, and crowdsourcing. Adam earned his BA from Harvard University and his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, after which he served as an Assistant Professor at both Georgia Tech and the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. He also contributes to Project CETI’s science team, an interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to decoding sperm whale communication. In addition, Adam has co-chaired leading conferences such as COLT (Conference on Learning Theory), HCOMP (Conference on Human Computation), and NEML. His work has been recognized with numerous honors, including several best paper awards, an NSF CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and most notably the Majulook Prize.

You can contact me at (the middle four letters of macadamias) @kal.ai