Jeremy Howard (born 13 November 1973) is an Australian data scientist, entrepreneur, and educator. He is the co-founder of fast.ai, where he teaches introductory courses, develops software, and conducts research in the area of deep learning. Previously he founded and led Fastmail, Optimal Decisions Group, and Enlitic. He was President and Chief Scientist of

Kaggle Kaggle, a subsidiary of Google LLC, is an online community of data scientists and machine learning practitioners. Kaggle allows users to find and publish data sets, explore and build models in a web-based data-science environment, work with othe ...

. Early in the

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei, identified in Wuhan, China, in December ...

epidemic he was a leading advocate for masking.

Early life

Howard was born in

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

, and moved to

Melbourne Melbourne ( ; Boonwurrung/Woiwurrung: ''Narrm'' or ''Naarm'') is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second-most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Its name generally refers to a met ...

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

in 1976. He attended

Melbourne Grammar (Pray and Work) , established = 1849 (on present site since 1858 - the celebrated date of foundation) , type = Independent, co-educational primary, single-sex boys secondary, day and boarding , denomination ...

and studied philosophy at the

University of Melbourne The University of Melbourne is a public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in Victoria. Its main campus is located in Parkville, an inner suburb nor ...

Career

Howard started his career in management consulting, working McKinsey & Co and AT Kearney. He remained in management consulting for eight years before becoming an entrepreneur. Early in his career, Howard contributed to open source projects, particularly the

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

programming language,

Cyrus IMAP server The Cyrus IMAP server is electronic mail server software developed by Carnegie Mellon University. It differs from other Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) server implementations in that it is generally intended to be run on sealed servers, ...

, and Postfix SMTP server. He helped develop the Perl language, as chair of the Perl6-data working group, and author of RFCs. While in Australia, Howard founded two successful startups: the email provider FastMail.FM, which he sold to

Opera Software Opera is a Norwegian multinational technology company and subsidiary of Kunlun that specializes in web browser development, fintech, as well as services such as Opera News and YoYo Games. The company's total user base, including users of its ...

, and the insurance pricing optimization company Optimal Decisions Group (ODG), which he sold to

ChoicePoint LexisNexis Risk Solutions is a global data and analytics company that provides data and technology services, analytics, predictive insights and fraud prevention for a wide range of industries. It is headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia (part of ...

. Fastmail was one of the first email products that enabled users to integrate their familiar desktop clients.

Kaggle

Howard first became involved with

, founded in April 2010, after becoming the globally top-ranked participant in data science competitions in both 2010 and 2011. The competitions that Howard won involved tourism forecasting and predicting the success of grant applications. Howard then became the President and Chief Scientist of Kaggle. In December 2011,

Wired Magazine ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online magazine, online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquar ...

ran a piece on Howard, calling him 'The Accidental Scientist'. Howard was also interviewed by the

McKinsey Quarterly The ''McKinsey Quarterly'' is a business magazine focused on management and organizational theory. It is written primarily by McKinsey McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm founded in 1926 by University of Chicago professor ...

, where he explained that the rapid advance of machine learning presents an economic paradox; while productivity is rising, employment may not. By December 2013, Howard had left his position as President of Kaggle.

Enlitic

In August 2014, Howard founded Enlitic to use

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

to make medical diagnostics and clinical decision support tools faster, more accurate, and more accessible. Enlitic uses

Deep Learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. De ...

algorithms to diagnose illness and disease. Howard believes that today, machine learning algorithms are actually as good as or better than humans at many things that we think of as being uniquely human capabilities. Howard taught data science at company

Singularity University Singularity Education Group (using the public names Singularity Group, Singularity University or SingularityU) is an American company that offers executive educational programs, a business incubator, and business consultancy services. Although ...

. He was also a

Young Global Leader Forum of Young Global Leaders, or Young Global Leaders (YGL), was created by Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum. The YGL, a non-profit organization managed from Geneva, Switzerland, is under the supervision of the Swiss government ...

with the

World Economic Forum The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental and lobbying organisation based in Cologny, canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab. The foundation, ...

, and spoke at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2014 on "Jobs For The Machines." Howard advised

Khosla Ventures Khosla Ventures is an American venture capital firm founded by Vinod Khosla, focused on early-stage companies in the Internet, computing, mobile, financial services, agriculture, healthcare and clean technology sectors. Some of its most successf ...

as their Data Strategist, identifying the biggest opportunities for investing in data-driven startups and mentoring their portfolio companies to build data-driven businesses.

fast.ai

Together with Rachel Thomas, he is the co-founder of fast.ai, a research institute dedicated to make

more accessible. He teaches introductory courses, both online and in-person, and at

Queensland University , mottoeng = By means of knowledge and hard work , established = , endowment = A$224.3 million , budget = A$2.1 billion , type = Public research university , chancellor = Peter Varghese , vice_chancellor = Deborah Terry , city = Br ...

, where he is honorary professor at the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. Previously he taught at the

University of San Francisco The University of San Francisco (USF) is a private Jesuit university in San Francisco, California. The university's main campus is located on a setting between the Golden Gate Bridge and Golden Gate Park. The main campus is nicknamed "The Hil ...

, where he was Distinguished Research Scientist. He also develops software, such as the fastai library.

ULMFiT

As part of his research in fast.ai he developed the ULMFiT algorithm, which is credited with pioneering

transfer learning Transfer learning (TL) is a research problem in machine learning (ML) that focuses on storing knowledge gained while solving one problem and applying it to a different but related problem. For example, knowledge gained while learning to recognize ...

and fine-tuning techniques in

Natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to pro ...

, and contributing to the development of modern

language model A language model is a probability distribution over sequences of words. Given any sequence of words of length , a language model assigns a probability P(w_1,\ldots,w_m) to the whole sequence. Language models generate probabilities by training on ...

s, such as the GPT family.

Personal life and interests

Howard used Spaced Repetitive Learning to develop usable Chinese language skills in just one year. He has mentored and advised many startups, and is also an angel investor. He has contributed to a range of open-source projects as a developer, and was a regular guest expert on Australia's most popular TV morning news program ''

Sunrise Sunrise (or sunup) is the moment when the upper rim of the Sun appears on the horizon in the morning. The term can also refer to the entire process of the solar disk crossing the horizon and its accompanying atmospheric effects. Terminology Al ...

''.

References

External links

*
Personal bio at Singularity University

Jeremy Howard: The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learn
at

TED TED may refer to: Economics and finance * TED spread between U.S. Treasuries and Eurodollar Education * ''Türk Eğitim Derneği'', the Turkish Education Association ** TED Ankara College Foundation Schools, Turkey ** Transvaal Education Depa ...

Howard's machine-learning startup, Enlitic

Interviews

Jeremy_Howard:_fast.ai_Deep_Learning_Courses_and_Research_.html" ;"title="Lex Fridman">Jeremy Howard: fast.ai Deep Learning Courses and Research "> Lex Fridman
Podcast #35 27 August 2019
Interview with Jeremy Howard , fast.ai , Kaggle , Machine Learning Research
Chai Time Data Science, 8 December 2019 * Jeremy Howard — The Story of fast.ai and Why Python Is Not the Future of ML
Gradient Dissent
podcast, 25 August 2020
Jeremy Howard — The Simple but Profound Insight Behind DiffusionDissent podcast
5 January 2023. {{DEFAULTSORT:Howard, Jeremy 1973 births Living people Australian company founders Artificial intelligence researchers