Leqi Liu, a Ph.D. student in the School of Computer Science's Machine Learning Department, has been chosen as a 2020 Open Phil AI fellow. She is one of 10 students across the U.S. to receive a fellowship. The Open Phil AI Fellowship, organized by the Open Philanthropy Project, supports the research of a small group of promising machine learning researchers over five years, and fosters that community with a culture of trust, debate, excitement and intellectual excellence. Liu's research, advised by Assistant Professor Zachary Lipton, aims to develop learning systems that can infer human preferences from their behaviors and help humans achieve their goals. In particular, she is interested in bringing theory from social sciences into algorithmic design.

Open Philanthropy recommended a total of approximately $2,300,000 over five years in PhD fellowship support to 10 promising machine learning researchers that together represent the 2020 class of the Open Phil AI Fellowship.1 These fellows were selected from more than 380 applicants for their academic excellence, technical knowledge, careful reasoning, and interest in making the long-term, large-scale impacts of AI a central focus of their research. This falls within our focus area of potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence. We believe that progress in artificial intelligence may eventually lead to changes in human civilization that are as large as the agricultural or industrial revolutions; while we think it's most likely that this would lead to significant improvements in human well-being, we also see significant risks. Open Phil AI Fellows have a broad mandate to think through which kinds of research are likely to be most valuable, to share ideas and form a community with like-minded students and professors, and ultimately to act in the way that they think is most likely to improve outcomes from progress in AI. The intent of the Open Phil AI Fellowship is both to support a small group of promising researchers and to foster a community with a culture of trust, debate, excitement, and intellectual excellence.