Lex Fridman

Alexei "Lex" Fridman (/ˈfriːdmən/; born 15 August 1983) is an American computer scientist and podcaster. Since 2018, he has hosted the Lex Fridman Podcast, where he interviews notable figures from various fields such as science, technology, sports, the arts, and politics. Fridman rose to prominence in 2019 after Elon Musk praised a study Fridman authored at MIT, which concluded that drivers remained focused while using Tesla's semi-autonomous driving system. The study was not peer-reviewed and was criticized by AI experts.[3][4] That year Fridman transitioned to an unpaid role at MIT AgeLab,[3] and since 2022 has worked as a research scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).[5][6] As of February 2024, Fridman lives in Texas and is employed at MIT.[7] Fridman was born in Chkalovsk, Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, and grew up in Moscow.[8][3] He is Jewish.[9] His father, Alexander Fridman, is a plasma physicist and professor at Drexel University. His brother Gregory was also a professor at Drexel.[3] When he was about 11, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fridman's family moved from Russia to the Chicago area.[3][10] He attended Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville, Illinois.[11] He then went on to obtain B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science at Drexel University in 2010,[12] and completed his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at Drexel in 2014.[13] His doctoral dissertation, Learning of Identity from Behavioral Biometrics for Active Authentication, was completed under the advisement of engineering educators Moshe Kam and Steven Weber and sought to "investigate the problem of active authentication on desktop computers and mobile devices".[14] In 2014, he spent six months at Google continuing his dissertation work on the use of AI for identity authentication and participated in "deep learning efforts for large-scale behavior-based authentication".[13][15]