Roman Yampolskiy

Roman Vladimirovich Yampolskiy (Роман Владимирович Ямпольский; born 13 August 1979) is a Latvian computer scientist at the University of Louisville, known for his work on behavioral biometrics, security of cyberworlds, and AI safety. He holds a PhD from the University at Buffalo (2008). He is currently the director of Cyber Security Laboratory in the department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the Speed School of Engineering.

Yampolskiy is an author of some 100 publications, including numerous books.

AI safety
Yampolskiy has warned of the possibility of existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence, and has advocated research into "boxing" artificial intelligence. More broadly, Yampolskiy and his collaborator, Michaël Trazzi, have proposed introducing "Achilles' heels" into potentially dangerous AI, for example by barring an AI from accessing and modifying its own source code. Another proposal is to apply a "security mindset" to AI safety, itemizing potential outcomes in order to better evaluate proposed safety mechanisms.

He has suggested that there is no evidence of a solution to the AI control problem and has proposed pausing AI development, arguing that "Imagining humans can control superintelligent AI is a little like imagining that an ant can control the outcome of an NFL football game being played around it". He joined AI researchers such as Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell in signing "Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter".

In an appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast in 2024, Yampolskiy predicted the chance that AI could lead to human extinction at "99.9% within the next hundred years".

Yampolskiy has been a research advisor of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and an AI safety fellow of the Foresight Institute.

Intellectology
In 2015, Yampolskiy launched intellectology, a new field of study founded to analyze the forms and limits of intelligence. Yampolskiy considers AI to be a sub-field of this. An example of Yampolskiy's intellectology work is an attempt to determine the relation between various types of minds and the accessible fun space, i.e. the space of non-boring activities.

AI-Completeness
Yampolskiy has worked on developing the theory of AI-Completeness, suggesting the Turing Test as a defining example.

Books

 * Feature Extraction Approaches for Optical Character Recognition. Briviba Scientific Press, 2007, ISBN 0-6151-5511-1
 * Computer Security: from Passwords to Behavioral Biometrics. New Academic Publishing, 2008, ISBN 0-6152-1818-0
 * Game Strategy: a Novel Behavioral Biometric. Independent University Press, 2009, ISBN 0-578-03685-1
 * Artificial Superintelligence: a Futuristic Approach. Chapman and Hall/CRC Press (Taylor & Francis Group), 2015, ISBN 978-1482234435
 * AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable. Chapman & Hall/CRC Press, 2024, ISBN 978-1032576268