Nando de Freitas

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Nando de Freitas
Professor University of Oxford | Google DeepMind
52 YEARS OLD
Dr. Nando de Freitas is a renowned machine learning professor at Oxford University, a lead research scientist at Google DeepMind, and a Canadian Institute For Advanced Research (CIFAR) Fellow. He is passionate about understanding and utilizing intelligence to solve the most pressing environmental and societal problems. Dr. de Freitas researches deep learning and its associated areas, including transfer learning, abstraction, reinforcement learning, multi-agents, and robotics.

Dr. de Freitas received his Ph.D. from Trinity College, Cambridge University, on Bayesian methods for neural networks. He went on to complete a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley in the AI group of Stuart Russell. In addition to his academic positions, Dr. de Freitas has spun off several successful companies, including Dark Blue Labs, which Google acquired.

Dr. de Freitas has received numerous awards for his groundbreaking research, including best paper awards at IJCAI 2013, ICLR 2016, ICML 2016, and the Yelp Dataset award for a multi-instance transfer learning paper at KDD 2015. He also received the 2012 Charles A. McDowell Award for Excellence in Research and the 2010 Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems (MITACS) Young Researcher Award.

Dr. de Freitas is an action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research and has created online courses on Machine Learning and Deep Learning in Monte Carlo. You can follow him on Twitter, and if you are a Ph.D./DPhil applicant, please visit the admissions website for further instructions.
Fun Facts
He was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley in the AI group of Stuart Russell.
He spun off a few companies, most recently Dark Blue Labs acquired by Google
Memorable Quotations2
I want to understand intelligence and harness it to extend our minds so that we can better solve challenging problems affecting us all and our environment.
I conduct research in deep learning, and associated areas including transfer learning, abstraction, reinforcement learning, multi-agents, and applications to robotics and all types of data.
Notable Awards
Best paper awards at IJCAI – 2013
Yelp Dataset award – 2015
Summary of recent tweets
Nando de Freitas, an AI researcher, has been actively tweeting about various topics recently. In one of his tweets, he discusses the effectiveness of parameterizing neural nets to predict logits and training them using the cross-entropy loss function. He also mentions that this setup works for diffusion models as well by using score interpolation instead of score matching. Nando provides a link to an article for further reference on this topic. Additionally, Nando raises questions about redundancy in language and its role in error correction for learning auto-regressive language models. He expresses his curiosity regarding whether there is a formal proof or experiment supporting the intuition behind this concept. Moreover, Nando shares a tweet where he highlights the importance of parsing tables in PDFs and introduces the use of the Table Transformer model combined with GPT-4V to extract table images and synthesize answers. He provides links to a notebook guide and documentation explaining these techniques. Furthermore, Nando retweets several posts related to recent advancements in AI technology. These include topics such as seamless speech-to-text conversion, energy-based transformers combining attention and associative memory for error correction during inference, open-access video generation models, motion-conditioned image animation for video editing, diffusion models achieving ImageNet linear-probe classification success, and large multi-view datasets showcasing human experts performing skilled activities. Based on these tweets analyzed so far, it seems that Nando de Freitas is actively engaged in exploring various trends and advancements within the field of AI research.

SOME AI BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

Nando de Freitas hasn't written a book yet or we didn't find any ISBN number for their book(s). However, here are some popular books in AI:

Twitter Timeline of Professor Nando de Freitas