Adam Tauman Kalai is an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

who specializes in

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

and works at

OpenAI OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines ...

Education and career

Kalai graduated from

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

in 1996 and received a PhD from

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

in 2001, where he worked under doctoral advisor

Avrim Blum Avrim Louis Blum (born 27 May 1966) is a computer scientist. In 2007, he was made a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to learning theory and algorithms." Blum attended MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in 1991 ...

. He did his postdoctoral study at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

before becoming a faculty member at the

Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC or TTI-Chicago) is a private graduate school and research institute focused on computer science and located in Chicago, Illinois within the University of Chicago campus. It is supported by the e ...

and then the

Georgia Institute of Technology The Georgia Institute of Technology (commonly referred to as Georgia Tech, GT, and simply Tech or the Institute) is a public university, public research university and Institute of technology (United States), institute of technology in Atlanta, ...

. He joined Microsoft Research in 2008 and subsequently moved to OpenAI in 2023.

Contributions

Kalai is known for his algorithm for generating random factored numbers (see

Bach's algorithm Bach's algorithm is a probabilistic polynomial time algorithm for generating random numbers along with their factorizations. It was published by Eric Bach in 1988. No algorithm is known that efficiently factors random numbers, so the straightforw ...

), for efficiently learning learning mixtures of Gaussians, for the Blum-Kalai-Wasserman algorithm for learning parity with noise, and for the intractability of the folk theorem in game theory. More recently, Kalai is known for identifying and reducing gender bias in

word embedding In natural language processing, a word embedding is a representation of a word. The embedding is used in text analysis. Typically, the representation is a real-valued vector that encodes the meaning of the word in such a way that the words that ...

s, which are a representation of words commonly used in AI systems and for his work on

hallucinations A hallucination is a perception in the absence of an external stimulus that has the compelling sense of reality. They are distinguishable from several related phenomena, such as dreaming ( REM sleep), which does not involve wakefulness; pse ...

large language model A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially language generation. The largest and most capable LLMs are g ...

Personal life

Kalai is the son of professor

Ehud Kalai Ehud Kalai () is a prominent Israeli American game theorist and mathematical economist known for his contributions to the field of game theory and its interface with economics, social choice, computer science and operations research. He was the ...

and is married to fellow researcher Yael Tauman Kalai.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Kalai, Adam Tauman Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer scientists Georgia Tech faculty Carnegie Mellon University alumni Harvard University alumni OpenAI people