John Dickerson

jpdickerson.com is the personal website of John P. Dickerson, an artificial intelligence researcher and executive. The site presents his current role as CEO of Mozilla.ai, an effort focused on making open source AI models and tooling a default option for users, and states that growing Mozilla AI is his present focus. It also records prior roles: co-founder and Chief Scientist at Arthur, where enterprise-grade AI systems were developed and deployed, and tenured professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland with a joint appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He holds a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. Earlier, he built early allocation and pricing products at Optimized Markets.

The site describes advisory and investment activity in startups and nonprofits, with a stated preference for companies founded out of the University of Maryland and Carnegie Mellon; named examples include GovShop, which provides market intelligence to public sector buyers and suppliers, and Relace, which builds language models for coding agents. His academic research is described as supported by an NSF CAREER award and grants from NIST, NSA, DARPA, ARPA-E, NIH (R01) and NSF, along with industry gifts including from Google. The site notes work on worldwide blood donation with Facebook and more than a decade of involvement in organ allocation, primarily through the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS). A notice states he is no longer accepting PhD students and points prospective applicants to the Maryland Max Planck PhD Program.

The University of Maryland Department of Computer Science lists Dickerson as an Adjunct Associate Professor in CS, with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University (2016) and a B.Sc. from the University of Maryland (2008), and research areas in AI and robotics, databases and big data, and machine learning and data science. Departmental records list a 2019 NSF CAREER award, a 2019 Google Faculty Research award, and the 2020 UMD Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year award.

Traction

Research funding cited includes an NSF CAREER award and grants from NIST, NSA, DARPA, ARPA-E, NIH (R01) and NSF, plus industry gifts from partners such as Google. University records list a 2019 NSF CAREER award, a 2019 Google Faculty Research award and the 2020 UMD Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year award, along with PhD students advised.