Steve Omohundro
Stephen Malvern Omohundro is an American computer scientist whose areas of research include Hamiltonian physics, dynamical systems, programming languages, machine learning, machine vision, and the social implications of artificial intelligence. His current work uses rational economics to develop safe and beneficial intelligent technologies for better collaborative modeling, understanding, innovation, and decision making.
Education
Omohundro has degrees in physics and mathematics from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley.Learning algorithms
Omohundro started the "Vision and Learning Group" at the University of Illinois, which produced 4 Masters and 2 Ph.D. theses. His work in learning algorithms included a number of efficient geometric algorithms, the manifold learning task and various algorithms for accomplishing this task, other related visual learning and modelling tasks, the model merging approach to machine learning, and the Family Discovery Learning Algorithm, which discovers the dimension and structure of a parameterized family of stochastic models.Self-improving artificial intelligence and AI safety
Omohundro started Self-Aware Systems in Palo Alto, California to research the technology and social implications of self-improving artificial intelligence. He is an advisor to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute on artificial intelligence. He argues that rational systems exhibit problematic natural "drives" that will need to be countered in order to build intelligent systems safely. His papers, talks, and videos on AI safety have generated extensive interest. He has given many talks on self-improving artificial intelligence, cooperative technology, AI safety, and connections with biological intelligence.Programming languages
At Thinking Machines Corporation, Cliff Lasser and Steve Omohundro developed Star Lisp, the first programming language for the Connection Machine. Omohundro joined the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, where he led the development of the open source programming language Sather. Sather is featured in O'Reilly's History of Programming Languages poster.Physics and dynamical systems theory
Omohundro's book Geometric Perturbation Theory in Physics describes natural Hamiltonian symplectic structures for a wide range of physical models that arise from perturbation theory analyses.He showed that there exist smooth partial differential equations which stably perform universal computation by simulating arbitrary cellular automata. The asymptotic behavior of these PDEs is therefore logically undecidable.
With John David Crawford he showed that the orbits of three-dimensional period doubling systems can form an infinite number of topologically distinct torus knots and described the structure of their stable and unstable manifolds.