Peter Eckersley

Distinguished Technology Fellow

Peter Eckersley is Director of Research for the Partnership on AI (PAI), and provides advice as a Distinguished Technology Fellow at EFF.

Peter’s AI research interests are broad, and include prior work on measuring progress in the AI ecosystem, figuring out how to translate ethical and safety concerns into mathematical constraints, and setting sound policies around high-stakes machine learning applications such as self-driving vehicles, recidivism prediction, cybersecurity, and military uses of AI.

Prior to joining PAI, Peter was Chief Computer Scientist at EFF, where he led a team of technologists that launched numerous computer security and privacy projects, including Let’s Encrypt and CertbotPanopticlickHTTPS Everywhere; the SSL Observatory; and Privacy Badger. In addition to these projects, Peter and his team also worked on diverse Internet policy issues including campaigning to preserve open wireless networks; fighting to keep modern computing platforms open; helping to start the campaign against the SOPA/PIPA Internet blacklist legislation; and running the first controlled tests to confirm that Comcast was using forged reset packets to interfere with P2P protocols.

Peter holds a PhD in computer science and law from the University of Melbourne; his doctoral research focused on the practicality and desirability of using alternative compensation systems to pay authors and artists for their work, while legalizing P2P file sharing and similar distribution tools.

In addition to his affiliation as a Distinguished Technology Fellow at EFF, Peter currently serves on the board of the Internet Security Research Group and the Advisory Council of the Open Technology Fund; he is an Affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

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