Tao Burga
I'm a Technology Fellow at IFP, where I focus on AI and science, compute policy, and accelerating innovation in AI security.
I previously worked on compute policy as a Fellow at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, forecasting the societal impacts of advanced AI as a Junior Research Scientist at New York University, rational decision-making at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, and human-robot interaction as a Research Assistant at Brown University's Sloman Lab.
Writing
Tim Fist, Tao Burga, and Tim Hwang, Preparing for Launch, Institute for Progress, 2025.
Tao Burga, Tim Fist, Arushi Gupta, and Caleb Watney, Catalyzing a Golden Age: A Blueprint for Strategic AI R&D Investment, Institute for Progress, 2025.
Tao Burga, Conditional Export Controls on AI Chips, The Techno Industrial Policy Playbook, 2025.
Tao Burga, Arushi Gupta, and Tim Fist, The H20 Problem: Inference, Supercomputers, and US Export Control Gaps, Institute for Progress, 2025.
Tim Fist, Tao Burga, Arushi Gupta, and Jeremy Neufeld, An Action Plan for American Leadership in AI, Institute for Progress, 2025.
Tim Fist, Tao Burga, and Vivek Chilukuri, Technology to Secure the AI Chip Supply Chain: A Working Paper, Center for a New American Security, 2024.
Projects
The Launch Sequence: Ambitious AI projects to accelerate science and security (2025). See coverage by the New York Times.
Older research
Artificial Intelligence in Nuclear Command and Control: Experimental Evidence of Automation Bias from Humans and Large Language Models
Tao Burga. Honors thesis in the department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, Brown University, 2024.
Causally informed planning under uncertainty for furniture assembly
Semanti Basu, Semir Tatlidil, Kaishuo Zhang, F. Tao Burga Montoya, Steven Sloman, R. Iris Bahar. In Communicating Robot Learning Across Human-Robot Interaction, a workshop at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023. (Won a $550 prize from Google DeepMind.)
Object assembly using inferred causal models from humans
Semir Tatlidil, Semanti Basu, Kaishuo Zhang, F. Tao Burga Montoya, Steven Sloman, R. Iris Bahar. In Cognitive Modeling in Robot Learning for Adaptive Human-Robot Interactions Workshop @ ICRA, 2023.
Human-Generated Causal Models to Aid Robot Planning
Semanti Basu, Semir Tatlidil, Kaishuo Zhang, F. Tao Burga Montoya, R. Iris Bahar, Steven Sloman. In Workshop Your Study Design!, A Workshop at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2023.