Nando de Freitas
Professor University of Oxford
| Google DeepMind
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.