Justin Norman

Justin Norman

As AI Science Advisor to the California Department of Technology (CDT), Justin Norman, PhD, advises senior leadership on how developments in frontier AI development and governance impact key definitions and thresholds in California frontier AI safety legislation. He contributes to recommendations on frontier AI safety to the California Legislature and coordinate with a wide range of stakeholders, including government agencies, the academic research community, federal labs, the private sector, and community and nonprofit organizations, among others.

Justin is an AI/ML engineer with a long career in government and the private sector. He served as acting Portfolio Director and Technical Director for Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning at the Defense Innovation Unit. He was also the CTO/Deputy Director of the United States Indo-Pacific Command Joint Mission Accelerator Directorate, appointed as a member of the Department of the Navy’s Science and Technology Board federal advisory committee, and continues to serve in the United States Marine Corps as a reservist (LtCol). In his senior leadership roles in industry, he led more than 100 scientists, machine learning engineers, and product managers as CTO and Head of AI at Vera AI, Vice President of Data Science, Analytics and Data Products at Yelp, Director of Research and ML/AI Cloudera Fast Forward Labs, and Global Head of Cisco’s Enterprise Data Science Office, among others.

He completed his PhD at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, where he served on the Digital Security, Safety, and Trust Search Committee and as Technical Director of the Public Interest Technology Clinic. In addition to his current workstream, his research interests include GenAI (LLM/VLM) evaluation/robustness, improving the robustness of generative computer vision systems, deepfake detection, and content authenticity. He also completed an MBA from USC Marshall and is a recipient of the Marcus Foster Fellowship and the FASPE Design & Technology Fellowship.