Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University's connection to AI safety grantmaking primarily runs through Prof. Anqi (Angie) Liu, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Whiting School of Engineering. Her research group works on machine learning for trustworthy AI, developing algorithms that address three central challenges: making models robust to changing data distributions, providing accurate and honest uncertainty estimates, and incorporating human preferences and values into AI decision-making. Liu completed her PhD at the University of Illinois Chicago and her postdoctoral research at Caltech before joining Johns Hopkins. Liu's key research projects include distributionally robust learning under covariate shift, uncertainty quantification for AI safety and fairness, conformal prediction methods for safety assessment, off-policy reinforcement learning, and fair machine learning. Her work on JAWS and JAWS-X introduces distribution-free wrapper methods for uncertainty quantification that balance sample efficiency and computational tractability. She also works on calibrated uncertainty for large language models, including cross-lingual prediction calibration. Liu is affiliated with multiple Johns Hopkins research centers: the Mathematical Institute for Data Science (MINDS), the Institute for Assured Autonomy (IAA), the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP), and the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR). She is listed as a faculty member in the AI Existential Safety Community at the Future of Life Institute. Open Philanthropy recommended a grant of $94,600 to Johns Hopkins University in 2022 to support course buyouts enabling Prof. Liu to explore and prepare for AI safety research. She has also received an Amazon Research Award, a Johns Hopkins University and Amazon Initiative for AI Faculty Research Award, a Johns Hopkins Discovery Award, and an Institute for Assured Autonomy Challenge Grant. As of early 2026, the group includes approximately eight PhD students, several co-advised with other Hopkins faculty in related areas including robotics, NLP, and biostatistics.