Lex Fridman: The AI Scientist and Podcaster Who Interviews the World's Greatest Minds

Lex Fridman is a research scientist, podcaster and YouTuber who specializes in artificial intelligence, machine learning and human-robot interaction. He is currently a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he works on autonomous vehicles, deep learning and computer vision. He is also the host of the Lex Fridman Podcast, a podcast and YouTube series where he interviews some of the most influential and inspiring people in science, technology, philosophy, history and art.

Early life and education

Lex Fridman was born on August 15, 1986 in Moscow, Russia. He is of Jewish descent and has a brother named Gregory Fridman, who is also a researcher in plasma physics. His father is Alexander Fridman, a plasma physicist and professor at Drexel University. His mother is a mathematician and computer scientist.

Fridman moved to the United States with his family when he was about 10 years old. He grew up in Chicago, Illinois and attended Neuqua Valley High School. He was interested in math, physics and programming from an early age. He also played chess, guitar and piano.

He went on to study computer science at Drexel University, where he earned his BS, MS and PhD degrees. His PhD dissertation was on active authentication on mobile devices using biometric modalities such as face, voice, touch and gait. He was advised by Moshe Kam and Steven Weber.

Research career

Fridman started his research career at Google, where he worked on machine learning projects. He then joined MIT as a postdoctoral associate in 2015. He is currently a research scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), where he leads the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence group.

His research focuses on developing intelligent systems that can interact with humans in natural and intuitive ways. He works on topics such as computer vision, deep learning, natural language processing, planning, reasoning and decision making. He applies his research to domains such as autonomous vehicles, robotics, healthcare and education.

He has published over 50 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences, such as IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (TITS), IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) and IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV).

He has also received several awards and honors for his research, such as the CHI 2017 Best Paper Award, the CHI 2018 Honorable Mention Award, the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society Outstanding Research Award 2018 and the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society Outstanding Application Award 2019.

He has also led or participated in several large-scale research projects, such as the MIT Advanced Vehicle Technology Study (AVT), which collected real-world driving data from over 3,000 drivers using Tesla Autopilot; the Cognitive Load Estimation in the Wild project, which developed novel methods for estimating cognitive load from driver gaze; and the Arguing Machines project, which proposed a framework for human supervision of black box AI systems that make life-critical decisions.

Podcast career

Fridman launched his podcast in 2018 as part of an MIT course on artificial general intelligence. The original title was the Artificial Intelligence Podcast, which was later changed to the Lex Fridman Podcast to reflect the broader scope of topics he covers.

The podcast features long-form conversations with some of the world's greatest minds in science, technology, philosophy, history and art. Some of his notable guests include Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Harris, Joe Rogan, Vitalik Buterin, Grimes, Dan Carlin,