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Zoubin Ghahramani
Professor University of Cambridge
| Uber AI Labs
52 YEARS OLD
Zoubin Ghahramani is an accomplished academic. He is a Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge and Chief Scientist at Uber, where he co-founded and led Uber AI Labs. He is also Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and a St John's College Fellow. Previously, he was the founding Cambridge Director of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national Institute for Data Science.
Ghahramani has had an illustrious academic career, studying computer science and cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania before obtaining his Ph.D. from MIT in 1995. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto before becoming one of the founding members of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in London. He also served as a CMU's Machine Learning Department faculty member for over ten years.
Ghahramani's research interests include statistical machine learning, Bayesian nonparametric, scalable inference, probabilistic programming, and building an automatic statistician. He has published over 250 papers, receiving over 38,000 citations. He has been funded by grants and donations from EPSRC, DARPA, Microsoft, Google, Infosys, Facebook, Amazon, FX Concepts, NTT, and several other industrial partners. In 2013, he received a $750,000 Google Award for research on building the Automatic Statistician.
Ghahramani has also been an advisor to Microsoft Research Cambridge, VocalIQ (acquired by Apple), Cambridge Capital Management, Echobox, Informetis, Opera Solutions, and several other companies. He has also held leadership roles as program and general chair of the leading international conferences in machine learning: AISTATS (2005), ICML (2007, 2011), and NIPS (2013, 2014). In 2015, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 2016 he was named one of the Top Ten Most Influential Scholars in Machine Learning.
In addition to his academic pursuits, Ghahramani has a fascinating background. He spent his early childhood in the former Soviet Union and Iran before moving to Spain, where he attended the American School of Madrid for ten years.