Yaron Singer

Yaron Singer is a computer scientist and entrepreneur whose research has focused on algorithms, machine learning, optimization, and the security of artificial intelligence systems. He was the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University and co-founded Robust Intelligence, where he served as CEO. Cisco acquired Robust Intelligence in 2024. Singer is vice president of AI and security at Cisco's Foundation AI group.

Education and academic career

Singer earned a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. His dissertation, Incentives, Computation, and Networks: Limitations and Possibilities of Algorithmic Mechanism Design, was supervised by Christos Papadimitriou.

Before joining Harvard, Singer was a postdoctoral researcher at Google Research.

With Eric Balkanski, Singer developed algorithms for submodular optimization that evaluated multiple candidates in parallel, reducing the number of sequential steps needed to find a solution.

Singer has also studied adversarial machine learning, including how small changes to inputs can alter a model's predictions and how to make models more resistant to such attacks. He has also received an NSF CAREER Award, a Google Faculty Research Award, and a Facebook Faculty Award. As a graduate student, he received fellowships from Microsoft Research and Facebook.