Eric Joel Horvitz (/ˈhɔːrvɪts/) is an American computer scientist, and Technical Fellow at Microsoft, where he serves as the company's first Chief Scientific Officer.

Horvitz was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2013[2] for computational mechanisms for decision making under uncertainty and with bounded resources.

[6] In 2015, he was awarded the AAAI Feigenbaum Prize,[7] a biennial award for sustained and high-impact contributions to the field of artificial intelligence through the development of computational models of perception, reflection and action, and their application in time-critical decision making, and intelligent information, traffic, and healthcare systems.

He has served as president of the Association for the Advancement of AI (AAAI), on the NSF Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Advisory Board, on the council of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), chair of the Section on Information, Computing, and Communications of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), on the Board of Regents[11] of the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), and a member of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) that was established in 2018 and issued its final report in March 2021.

[12][13] Horvitz's research interests span theoretical and practical challenges with developing systems that perceive, learn, and reason.

His contributions include advances in principles and applications of machine learning and inference, information retrieval, human-computer interaction, bioinformatics, and e-commerce.

In related work, he applied probability and machine learning to solve combinatorial problems and to guide theorem proving.

[55][56][57] Online talks include both technical lectures and presentations for general audiences (TEDx Austin: Making Friends with Artificial Intelligence).

[70] He has presented on the risks of AI-enabled deepfakes and contributed to media provenance technologies[71] that cryptographically certify the source and history of edits of digital content.

[73] In a later NPR interview, he said that investments in scientific studies of superintelligences would be valuable to guide proactive efforts even if people believed that the probability of losing of control of AI was low because of the cost of such outcomes.

[76] A Stanford press release stated that sets of committees over a century will "study and anticipate how the effects of artificial intelligence will ripple through every aspect of how people work, live and play."

A framing memo for the study calls out 18 topics for consideration, including law, ethics, the economy, war, and crime.

[79][80] Panel chair Peter Stone argues that AI won't automatically replace human workers, but rather, will supplement the workforce and create new jobs in tech maintenance.

[90][91] He reported that the Aether Committee had made recommendations on and guided decisions that have influenced Microsoft's commercial AI efforts.

[92][93] In April 2020, Microsoft published content on principles, guidelines, and tools developed by the Aether Committee and its working groups, including teams focused on AI reliability and safety, bias and fairness, intelligibility and explanation, and human-AI collaboration.