UC Santa Barbara is a major public research university whose Center for Responsible Machine Learning conducts AI safety-adjacent research on fairness, bias, transparency, and the societal impacts of AI systems.
UC Santa Barbara is a major public research university whose Center for Responsible Machine Learning conducts AI safety-adjacent research on fairness, bias, transparency, and the societal impacts of AI systems.
People
Updated 05/18/26Professor of Computer Science; Founding Director, Center for Responsible Machine Learning
Assistant Professor of Computer Science; Director, Center for Responsible Machine Learning
Funding Details
Updated 05/18/26- Annual Budget
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Org Details
Updated 05/18/26The University of California, Santa Barbara is a public research university and one of ten campuses in the UC system, established as a general university campus in 1958. It is home to approximately 23,000 undergraduates and 3,000 graduate students, with around 2,400 academic faculty. UCSB is ranked among the top public universities in the United States and has been elected to the Association of American Universities. The AI safety-relevant work at UCSB is centered in the Center for Responsible Machine Learning (CRML), launched in fall 2019 under the direction of Professor William Wang, who holds the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Chair in Artificial Intelligence. The center brings together over 70 affiliated faculty from computer science, electrical engineering, statistics, communication, psychology, and other disciplines. Its research priorities include fairness, bias, privacy, transparency, explainability, and accountability in AI algorithms, as well as ethical, policy, legal, and energy-efficiency dimensions of machine learning. In the domain of AI safety, Professor Wang's NLP group has published work on LLM red-teaming, misinformation from language models, and LLM alignment. Open Philanthropy awarded UCSB a grant of $133,402 to support Professor Wang's project to build a database and taxonomy of real-world LLM use cases, funded under Open Philanthropy's program on potential risks from advanced artificial intelligence. UCSB also leads the ACTION Institute, a $20 million NSF-funded initiative focused on AI-powered cybersecurity, and hosts a range of other AI research groups including an NLP group and a Mind and Machine Intelligence program.
Theory of Change
Updated 05/18/26UCSB's AI safety-relevant work operates through academic research and knowledge production. By building empirical databases of LLM use cases and studying the risks of large language models (misinformation, misuse, misalignment), the research group aims to provide the broader AI safety community with grounded taxonomies and evaluations that inform safer development. The Center for Responsible Machine Learning brings interdisciplinary perspectives to identifying and mitigating harms from AI systems, contributing to norms and technical understanding that can reduce risks from advanced AI.
Grants Received
Updated 05/18/26Projects
Updated 05/18/26
An NSF National AI Research Institute led by UC Santa Barbara that develops agent-based AI systems for cyber threat intelligence and operations to protect mission-critical computer systems from sophisticated, evolving cyber attacks.
A research project and open dataset documenting over 94,000 real-world large language model use cases from Reddit and news articles, categorizing LLM applications and user demographics to enable empirical study of how LLMs are used across domains.
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