# [[👤Dan Hendrycks]] - [[Artificial Intelligence]] - [[👤Dan Hendrycks]] *** Dan Hendrycks is a prominent American machine learning researcher and a leading figure in the field of AI safety. Born in the mid-1990s, Hendrycks grew up in Marshfield, Missouri, in a Christian evangelical household[2]. He pursued his higher education at prestigious institutions, earning a B.S. from the University of Chicago in 2018 and later completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2022[2]. Currently, Hendrycks serves as the director of the Center for AI Safety, where he focuses on critical areas of AI research including machine learning safety, machine ethics, and robustness[2]. His work has made significant contributions to the field, including the development of the GELU activation function, which is widely used in state-of-the-art models like BERT, GPT, and Vision Transformers[3]. ## Research and Publications Hendrycks' research portfolio is extensive and impactful. He has authored numerous papers on AI safety, including "An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks," which explores four categories of potential risks associated with artificial intelligence[2]. In 2024, he published a comprehensive 568-page book titled "Introduction to AI Safety, Ethics, and Society," which serves as a valuable resource for students, practitioners, and anyone interested in understanding the complex landscape of AI safety[4][5]. ## Academic Contributions Beyond his research, Hendrycks has been actively involved in academic service. He has co-organized workshops on robustness and uncertainty estimation in deep learning at major conferences like ICML, and has served as a reviewer for prestigious publications in the field of computer vision and machine learning[3]. Hendrycks' work bridges the gap between theoretical research and practical applications, aiming to ensure that as AI technology advances, it does so in a manner that is safe, ethical, and beneficial to society. Citations: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN-kBA1JgYM [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Hendrycks [3] https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~hendrycks/ [4] https://www.aisafetybook.com [5] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.1201/9781003530336/introduction-ai-safety-ethics-society-dan-hendrycks [6] https://www.routledge.com/Introduction-to-AI-Safety-Ethics-and-Society/Hendrycks/p/book/9781032869926 [7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_dbiGMHKMA [8] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rahuljoshi22_data-analyst-gpt-future-of-data-analysis-activity-7157064809438404608-MT65