Peter Eckersley

Peter Eckersley is the Director of Research at the Partnership on AI. He leads PAI's internal research efforts and support for extenal work on a wide range of AI ethics and policy topics. Peter's AI research interests are broad, and include measuring progress in the AI ecosystem, figuring out how to translate ethical and safety concerns into mathematical constraints, and setting sound policies around high-stakes machine learning applications such as self-driving vehicles, recidivism prediction, cybersecurity, and military uses of AI. Prior to joining PAI, Peter was Chief Computer Scientist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where he led a team of technologists that launched numerous computer security and privacy projects, including Let’s Encrypt and Certbot; Panopticlick; HTTPS Everywhere; the SSL Observatory; and Privacy Badger. In addition to these projects, Peter and his team also worked on diverse Internet policy issues including campaigning to preserve open wireless networks; fighting to keep modern computing platforms open; helping to start the campaign against the SOPA/PIPA Internet blacklist legislation; and running the first controlled tests to confirm that Comcast was using forged reset packets to interfere with P2P protocols. Peter holds a PhD in computer science and law from the University of Melbourne.