Dr. Adam Russell is the Director of the AI Division at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI). In this role, he is responsible for coordinating the AI Division’s strategic directions, with a focus on advancing ISI’s abilities to make high impact contributions to the wider AI ecosystem to help solve our most important problems and ensure information and AI are democracy’s greatest assets. This includes finding new ways to seize the opportunities that AI offers us while minimizing the risks using new approaches like Violet Teaming. He currently hosts the AI/nsiders podcast to help people meet and better understand the diverse humans behind AI.
Adam is currently on part-time IPA loan from USC to the US Government to serve as the Chief Vision Officer for the recently launched AI Safety Institute at the National Institute of Standards and Technology at the US Department of Commerce. In this role, he is responsible for developing and promoting the strategic vision for the AI Safety Institute, with the goal of advancing the science of AI safety, accelerating the adoption of AI safety as a practice, and building an AI safety ecosystem to ensure AI benefits the US, our allies, and the world.
Prior to joining ISI, Adam was the Chief Scientist at the University of Maryland's Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security, or ARLIS, where he helped to stand up a new University-Affiliated Research Center (UARC) focused on creating multidisciplinary capabilities to advance human-machine teaming for US decision advantage. He was also an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland's Department of Psychology.
Adam’s almost 20-year career in applied research has included serving as a Program Manager at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), where he ran programs on measuring trust and trustworthiness as well as enhancing fluid intelligence, then as a Program Manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (where he was known as the DARPAnthropologist). His programs at DARPA were focused on exploring and quantifying how new technologies – including AI – might radically enhance our abilities to understand and design complex human systems to advance coordination, create more robust knowledge, reason counter-factually, and achieve better outcomes.
While at UMD, Adam was asked to serve as the Acting Deputy Director to help stand up the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), working as the de facto director to build the ARPA-H team, infrastructure, and brand until an inaugural director was identified and appointed.
Adam has served on numerous scientific advisory boards and has published multiple peer-reviewed journal articles. Adam has a BA in cultural anthropology from Duke University and a D.Phil. in social anthropology from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and won four Blues for representing Oxford in four rugby Varsity matches against Cambridge. He has also represented the United States in rugby at the international level, having played for the US national men’s rugby team (the Eagles).
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