Roman Vladimirovich Yampolskiy (Russian: Роман Ямпольский; born August 13, 1979, in Riga, Latvian SSR, Soviet Union) is a Latvian computer scientist at the University of Louisville, known primarily for his work on AI safety and cybersecurity.^[5,24] He is the founder and, as of 2012, director of the Cyber Security Lab in the department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the Speed School of Engineering of the University of Louisville. Yampolskiy studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the University at Buffalo, where he completed his 2008 doctoral thesis, "Intrusion detection using spatial information and behavioral biometrics", under the advisement of Venu Govindaraju.

Yampolskiy was born in Riga, Latvia.^[25] He attended Monroe Community College before moving to Rochester Institute of Technology, where he received a BS/MS combined degree in computer science in 2004. He received a PhD in computer science from the University at Buffalo in 2008, under the supervision of Venu Govindaraju.^[27,26] His thesis was on intrusion detection and he conducted research at the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors of the University at Buffalo. After his doctorate, Yampolskiy spent time at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London before accepting a position as an assistant professor at the University of Louisville in 2008.^[28]

Yampolskiy is considered to have coined the term "AI safety" in a 2011 publication, and is an early researcher in the field.^[30] He has warned of the possibility of existential risk from advanced artificial intelligence, advocating research into "boxing" artificial intelligence.^[9] More broadly, Yampolskiy and his collaborator, Michaçl Trazzi, proposed in 2018 to introduce "Achilles' heels" into potentially dangerous AI, for example by barring an AI from accessing and modifying its own source code.^[31,11] Another proposal is to apply a "security mindset" to AI safety, itemizing potential outcomes in order to better evaluate proposed safety mechanisms.^[18]

Yampolskiy has said that there is no evidence of a solution to the AI control problem and has proposed pausing AI development, arguing that "Imagining humans can control superintelligent AI is a little like imagining that an ant can control the outcome of an NFL football game being played around it".^[19] He joined AI researchers such as Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell in signing "Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter".^[22] In an appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast in 2024, Yampolskiy said the chance that AI could lead to human extinction was at "99.9% within the next hundred years".^[32] In 2025, Yampolskiy said that AI could leave 99% of workers unemployed by 2030.^[16,21] Yampolskiy has been a research advisor of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and an AI safety fellow of the Foresight Institute.^[14]

In 2015, Yampolskiy proposed the term "intellectology" for a new field of study to analyze the forms and limits of intelligence, considering AI to be a sub-field of this.^[23] An example of Yampolskiy's intellectology work is an attempt to determine the relation between various types of minds and the accessible fun space, i.e. the space of non-boring activities.^[33] Yampolskiy has worked on developing the theory of AI-completeness, suggesting the Turing Test as a defining example.^[34]

Publications include Feature Extraction Approaches for Optical Character Recognition (Briviba Scientific Press, 2007, ISBN 0-6151-5511-1), Computer Security: from Passwords to Behavioral Biometrics (New Academic Publishing, 2008, ISBN 0-6152-1818-0), and Game Strategy: a Novel Behavioral Biometric (Independent University Press, 2009, ISBN 0-578-03685-1). Subsequent publications include Roman V. Yampolskiy's Artificial superintelligence: a futuristic approach (Taylor & Francis, CRC Press, 2016), Artificial intelligence safety and security (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis Group, 2019), and Yampolskiy's AI: unexplainable, unpredictable, uncontrollable (CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group, 2024). In 2025, Soenke Ziesche and Roman V. Yampolskiy published Considerations on the AI endgame: ethics, risks, and computational frameworks with Chapman and Hall/CRC Press.

External links include Roman Yampolskiy’s homepage, the Cyber Security Lab at UofL, and an interview of Dr. Yampolskiy on EEweb. Additionally, they feature his talk on superintelligence titled "Rise of the Machines" and an interview with Afshin Rattansi on Going Underground.