John Dickerson, PhD

John Dickerson is CEO of Mozilla.ai. He brings a wealth of experience in scaling startups, developing practical and robust machine learning methods, deploying AI-based products into the enterprise, as well as providing broad AI/ML thought leadership in industry, academia, non-profits, and governments. 

Previously, John was co-founder and Chief Scientist at Arthur as well as a tenured professor at the University of Maryland in the Washington, DC area. 

• At Arthur, he helped scale the company to 50+ employees, a presence in NYC, DC, and the US west coast, and $55 million raised from seed through Series B financing. Arthur develops industry-leading technology in data drift detection and mitigation, bias detection and mitigation, GenAI firewall features such as jailbreak and PII leakage detection, and explainability. Arthur’s ML-based products are deployed at some of the largest regulated enterprises in the US and worldwide. 

• At Maryland, he founded and led a large lab researching the intersection of ML and economics, with a core focus of designing incentives that promote “good” participation in complex systems. That lab produced 16 PhD graduates and secured $10M+ in funding from NIST, NSA, DARPA, ARPA-E, NIH, NSF – including an NSF CAREER award – in addition to industry funding.

He has worked extensively on theoretical and empirical approaches to organ exchange where his work has set US-wide policy; worldwide blood donation markets with Meta; game-theoretic approaches to counter-terrorism and negotiation, where his models have been deployed; and market design problems in industry (e.g., online advertising) through various startups. 

John holds a BS in mathematics and a BS in computer science from the University of Maryland, as well as a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. He splits his time between Seattle, Washington, USA and Western Europe.