Nando de Freitas is a researcher in the field of

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 ...

, and in particular in the subfields of neural networks, Bayesian inference and Bayesian optimization, and deep learning.

Biography

De Freitas was born in

Zimbabwe Zimbabwe (), officially the Republic of Zimbabwe, is a landlocked country located in Southeast Africa, between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers, bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the south-west, Zambia to the north, and ...

. He did his undergraduate studies (1991–94) and MSc (1994–96) at the

University of the Witwatersrand The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (), is a multi-campus South African public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits ( or ). The university ...

, and his PhD at

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...

(1996-2000). From 2001, he was a professor at the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks among the top thre ...

, before joining the Department of Computer Science at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

from 2013 to 2017. He now works for

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

's DeepMind.

Awards and recognition

De Freitas has been recognised for his contributions to machine learning through the following awards: * Best Paper Award at the

International Conference on Machine Learning The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is the leading international academic conference in machine learning. Along with NeurIPS and ICLR, it is one of the three primary conferences of high impact in machine learning and artifici ...

(2016) * Best Paper Award at the

International Conference on Learning Representations The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) is a machine learning conference typically held in late April or early May each year. The conference includes invited talks as well as oral and poster presentations of refereed pap ...

(2016) * Google Faculty Research Award (2014) * Distinguished Paper Award at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2013) * Charles A. McDowell Award for Excellence in Research (2012) * Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems Young Researcher Award (2010)

References

External links

Nando de Freitas home page
Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Zimbabwean scientists University of the Witwatersrand alumni Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge University of British Columbia faculty Members of the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford Fellows of Linacre College, Oxford Machine learning researchers Artificial intelligence researchers Google employees British computer scientists {{compu-bio-stub