Andrew Smart

Andrew Smart

PhD Candidate

Andrew Smart is a Senior Research Scientist at Google Research working broadly on understanding social impacts of AI. He is based in San Francisco. His first love is philosophy and he is excited to join the MINT lab as a (very old) PhD student. A lifelong goal of his is to finish a PhD in philosophy. At Google he has collaborated with philosophers to critically examine foundational epistemic and philosophy of science questions about data, machine learning, and of course recently LLMs and foundation models. He has collaborated with MINT alum Atoosa Kasirzadah on how counterfactuals get used or misused in ML fairness, and he recently collaborated with Mel Andrews and Abeba Birhane on how abandoned pseudoscientific ideas get recycled back into scientific research via machine learning. He hopes to foster more collaboration between philosophers of technology and technologists at Google. 

Prior to joining Google he was a research scientist at Twitter, Novartis, and Honeywell Aerospace. He has worked on data science, medical device safety, clinical research, and safety engineering/human factors in aviation. His academic background is in anthropology, philosophy and cognitive science. He has a masters degree in cognitive science from Lund University in Sweden, and he worked as a junior research scientist at NYU, where he worked on brian imaging of human language. He is also the author of two popular science books about the neuroscience of idleness and about the possibility of robots taking psychedelic drugs.