Partnership on AI Announces Executive Director Terah Lyons and Welcomes New Partners

We are thrilled to announce Terah Lyons as the Founding Executive Director of the Partnership on AI (PAI). Terah joins us from the Mozilla Foundation, where she was most recently a Technology Policy Fellow. Prior to that she served as Policy Advisor to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OS TP). Her primary area of expertise is in technology governance, with a specific focus in machine intelligence, AI, and robotics.

While at the White House, Terah co-directed the White House Future of Artificial Intelligence Initiative, which engaged industry, the academic and technical community, civil society, and international stakeholders to formulate recommendations for a domestic policy strategy on machine intelligence. As part of this effort, she helped lead a landmark series of reports that explored the benefits and challenges of AI on behalf of the United States Government. Prior to the White House, Terah was a Fellow with the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and also previously worked at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government Center for Public Leadership.

Under her leadership, the Partnership will build upon immediate objectives around its organization, governance, and activities. These efforts include creating a diverse steering committee of cross-sector advisors, setting priorities for issues within each of the organization’s Thematic Pillars, and establishing a set of working groups to study and formulate best practices.

Today we also welcome 21 new Partners to the Partnership on AI, who join our existing 32 Partners, some of whom joined in May. The latest partners hail from three continents and represent a broad cross-section of industry, nonprofit, and academic organizations.

We welcome from the nonprofit and academic sectors the Association for Computing Machinery, AI Now Institute, Amnesty International, Article 19, Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, Center for Information Technology Policy Princeton University, Doteveryone, Fraunhofer IAO, Future of Life Institute, The Hastings Center, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics Santa Clara University, Omidyar Network, Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford, University of Washington Tech Policy Lab, Tufts University HRI Lab, and UCL Engineering. From industry, we welcome Accenture, Affectiva, Element AI, and NVIDIA.

Next week, the Board of Directors and representatives from the Partners’ organizations will meet in Berlin to begin work on some of the goals outlined above.