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Home - AI Now Institute | Icebreaker

Home - AI Now Institute

We challenge & reimagine the current trajectory for AI.

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Executive Recruiter, Builder of Networks & Community, Connector of People & Threads that Shape the Future

Heidy Khlaaf, PhD, MBCS

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Dr. Heidy Khlaaf is the Chief AI Scientist at the AI Now Institute focusing on the assessment and safety of AI within autonomous weapons systems. Overall, she specialises in the evaluation, specification, and verification of complex or autonomous software implementations in safety-critical systems. She has an extensive and broad range of expertise in leading system safety audits (e.g., IEC 61508, DO-178C), varying from UAVs to large nuclear power plants, that contribute to construction of safety cases for safety-critical software. She has bolstered the dependability and robustness of complex software systems through techniques such as system hazard analyses and formal verification to identify and mitigate for system and software risks. Dr. Khlaaf has helped establish and pioneer the field of AI Safety Engineering, and is known for her work leading the safety evaluation of Codex at OpenAI where she developed a framework that measures a model’s performance outcomes against a cross functional risk assessment, now a de facto methodology used across AI labs. She was previously the Engineering Director of the AI Assurance team at Trail of Bits, where she led the cyber evaluations as part of the launch of the UK AI Safety Institute, and unveiled the LeftoverLocals vulnerability. Her unique expertise at the intersection of Systems Software Engineering and Machine Learning has allowed her to lead, contribute, and produce the development of various standards and auditing frameworks for safety related applications and their development. This includes policy and regulatory frameworks for US and UK Regulators that enable the assurance of AI and ML to be safely deployed within critical systems. She is currently part of the Network of Experts for UNSG’s AI Advisory Body, and an ISO SC 42 (Artificial Intelligence) Committee Member via the British Standards Institute. She has been featured in TIME, NPR, Politico, Vox, WIRED, and many other media outlets She completed her Computer Science PhD at University College London in 2017, where she was advised by Nir Piterman. She was a recipient of the prestigious NSF GRFP award. Her work focused on the temporal verification, termination, and non-termination of infinite-state software systems. She has won a best paper award at CAV 2015, and a subsequent invitation to JACM, for her work on the first automated algorithm to verify CTL* verification for infinite-state systems. Official webpage can be found at: http://heidyk.com/