Damon Horowitz

Dr. Damon Horowitz is a philosophy professor and serial entrepreneur. His work explores what is possible at the boundaries of technology and the humanities.

Horowitz consults for a small portfolio of mission-driven organizations, with a special emphasis on AI and Ethics. He was previously an advisor for AltSchool, serving as interim Chief Academic Officer, and worked at Google as "In-House Philosopher" and Director of Engineering, heading development of personalization and privacy initiatives. He joined Google from Aardvark, the popular social search engine, where he was co-founder and CTO, overseeing product development and research strategy. He has taught courses in philosophy, AI, and cognitive science at Columbia, NYU, Stanford, U Penn, and San Quentin State Prison; and he has served on the Board of several arts and humanities non-profits, including CalHumanities. In industry, he built several startups based on his natural language processing research, including Aardvark (acquired by Google), Perspecta (acquired by Excite), Novation Biosciences (acquired by Agilent), and NewsDB (Daylife); and is currently Consulting Philosopher at AltSchool.

Horowitz currently teaches in the Core Curriculum at Columbia University. Previously, he has taught philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science at Stanford, NYU, University of Pennsylvania, and San Quentin State Prison. He is a popular public speaker at venues ranging from TED to AAAI to O'Reilly conferences, and his work has been featured in media ranging from the New York Times to Discovery Channel to NPR to TechCrunch. Damon has served on the Board of several arts and humanities non-profits, including California Humanities. He earned his B.A. from Columbia, M.S. from the MIT Media Lab, and Ph.D. from Stanford.