John Kirchenbauer

In Tom Goldstein’s lab at the University of Maryland, John spent the first part of his PhD working on techniques to discern whether the thing you’re currently reading or looking at was created by a human or generated by an AI system. With the release of ChatGPT in 2022, all of a sudden, that became a very practical challenge. More generally, his research has explored robustness, reliability, and safety in deep learning as well as understanding how training data impacts model behavior. He is predominantly motivated by a belief that attempting (and often failing) to teach machines to understand the world is a good way to learn more about what the real building blocks of general intelligence are along the way.

Before starting his PhD at UMD, John worked at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University as a research engineer (FFRDC). He completed a BS and MS in Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis in 2020 and received a diploma in Violin from Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music in 2017. When not doing research, John likes being in the mountains, and listening to Mahler.