By Marion Neumann
Welcome to the eighth interview in our series profiling senior AI researchers. This month we are especially happy to interview our SIGAI advisory board member, Thomas Dietterich, Director of Intelligent Systems at the Institute for Collaborative Robotics and Intelligence Systems (CoRIS) at Oregon State University.

In the 1980s and 1990s, several researchers (most notably Todd LaPorte, Gene Rochlin, and Karlene Roberts) undertook the study of human organizations that operate high-risk systems while achieving very low error rates. They called these organizations “High Reliability Organizations” (or HROs), and they tried to characterize what aspects of these organizations accounted for their high reliability.