SAFE Annual Meeting 2026

Co-Director, Stanford Center for AI Safety

Associate Professor of Aeronautics & Astronautics, Stanford University

Mykel is an Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. He is the director of the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL), conducting research on advanced algorithms and analytical methods for the design of robust decision making systems. His research contributed to what became the international standard for aircraft collision avoidance. Prof. Kochenderfer is a co-director of the Stanford Center for AI Safety and senior fellow of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He is an author of the textbooks Decision Making under Uncertainty: Theory and Application (MIT Press, 2015), Algorithms for Optimization (MIT Press, 2019), Algorithms for Decision Making (MIT Press, 2022), and Algorithms for Validation (MIT Press, 2026).

Head of Safeguards

Anthropic

Head of Safety

Cohere

Seraphina is the Head of Safety at Cohere, where she works on both the practice and the theory of evaluating and mitigating harms from LLMs. She has a PhD in NLP from the University of Edinburgh, with a focus on Fairness, and an MSc from UW, with a focus on generation. Her research interests include the changing landscape of agentic security, agentic simulated worlds, and the intersection of safety with robustness and generalisation. Before her PhD, she worked as a Research Engineer at the Information Sciences Institute, and for many years at Google in Tokyo, NYC, and Shanghai. She also spent two years as a sailor in the North Sea.

Civil Society & Philanthropy

OpenAI Foundation

Head of Governance

Transluce

Conrad serves as Head of Governance for Transluce, a nonprofit AI research lab, and Chair of the AI Evaluator Forum, a network of independent AI evaluation organizations. He previously led the U.S. Center for Standards and Innovation and led AI policy development in various roles across the White House, Congress, and the Department of Defense, building on his prior experience as a machine learning engineer.

Associate Professor of Electrical & Systems Engineering

University of Pennsylvania

Co-Founder & CTO

Valgo

Sydney is the co-founder and CTO of Valgo, where she focuses on quantifying deployment risk for insurance of physical AI systems. She received her PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford in 2023 with research focused on the design and validation of safety critical systems. She is an author of the textbook Algorithms for Validation and teaches a course in the winter quarter at Stanford called Validation of Safety Critical Systems.

Co-Founder & CEO

Valgo

Robert is the co-founder and CEO of Valgo, a public benefit corporation building risk models for the validation and insurance of safety-critical autonomy. He received his PhD in computer science from Stanford, where he studied algorithms for safe planning under uncertainty and safety validation, advised by Mykel Kochenderfer. Before Stanford, Robert was at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he helped develop, optimize, and validate ACAS X, the next-generation aircraft collision avoidance system that became a worldwide standard.

M.S. Candidate

Stanford University

Houjun is a first year Master's student in computer science, advised by Professor Mykel Kochenderfer. His research focuses on building adaptive neural network architectures for generalization into diverse use cases, and ensuring these uses can be safeguarded by adaptive safeguards. Houjun is affiliated with the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory and the Stanford NLP Group.