A picture of Jaime Fernández Fisac sitting outdoors on the Princeton campus.

Jaime Fernández Fisac

Assistant Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Princeton University

Email: jfisac at princeton

Office: EQuad F315

About Me

I am interested in developing theoretical proofs and computational methods to enable robots and AI to operate safely around people in a way that we can all understand and trust.

Robotic systems promise to revolutionize our homes, cities and roads, but they still struggle with complex physics, changing conditions, and extreme events. At the same time, the excitement around the generative AI boom is tempered by new concerns about potential harms to people from poorly understood interactions for which we don’t yet have robust guardrails. So far, strong safety assurances have eluded both technologies, but I believe each may contain the key to the other.

My work combines control systems, artificial intelligence, and game theory to help robotic and AI systems reason robustly about their own safety despite using inevitably flawed models of the world and other agents.

Specifically, my research focuses on the following areas: 

  • Safe robot learning: how can robots acquire new skills, explore unknown environments, and adapt to unexpected situations without risking accidents?

  • Safe interaction and corner-case handling: how can robots ensure safety while sharing the space (or the road) with scores of nearby agents, including people, even in the rare but crucial corner cases?

  • Human–AI safety: how can increasingly advanced AI systems anticipate and prevent harm to people in open-ended interaction settings like dialogue or content generation?

Bio in a nutshell

I completed my PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley in 2019; at the midpoint of my PhD, I spent 6 months doing R&D work at Apple. Before that, I got my B.S./M.S. Electrical Engineering degree at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain and a Masters in Aeronautics at Cranfield University in the UK.

Before joining Princeton in Summer 2020, I spent a year as a Research Scientist at Waymo (formerly known as Google’s Self-Driving Car project).

At Princeton, I am an Assistant Professor in Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. I am also an Associated Faculty in the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning and a co-director of the Princeton AI4ALL summer camp.