Alex Beutel

Alex Beutel is currently a Member of Technical Staff and Research Scientist at OpenAI, where he serves as the tech lead for their Safety Research teams.12 Here are some key details about his background and career:

Professional Experience

Alex joined OpenAI in June 2023 and is focused on improving the safety and alignment of OpenAI's models for real users.25 Prior to OpenAI, he had a distinguished career at Google:

• Senior Staff Research Scientist, Tech Lead, and Manager at Google Research (2016-2023)
• Led a Responsible ML team, driving research across areas like recommender systems, fairness, robustness, and machine learning for databases
• His work resulted in numerous papers and over 50 product launches

Education

• PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (2011-2016)
• BS from Duke University (2007-2011)1

Research Focus

Alex's research interests span several areas:

• User behavior modeling
• Responsible machine learning (fairness, robustness, safety)
• Recommender systems
• Fraud detection
• Reinforcement learning

He has published extensively in top conferences like KDD, WWW, NeurIPS, and WSDM.24

Achievements

• His PhD thesis on user behavior modeling, fraud detection, and recommender systems received KDD's Doctoral Dissertation Award Runner-Up
• Best Paper Award at ACM KDD and ACM GIS3
• Highly cited researcher with over 10,000 citations on Google Scholar4

Alex Beutel is recognized as a leading expert in responsible AI and machine learning, with a track record of impactful research and practical applications in industry settings.