Zoubin Ghahramani FRS ( fa, زوبین قهرمانی; born 8 February 1970) is a British-Iranian researcher and Professor of Information Engineering at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world's third oldest surviving university and one of its most pr ...

. He holds joint appointments at

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

and the Alan Turing Institute. and has been a

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of St John's College, Cambridge since 2009. He was Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science from 2003–2012. He was also the Chief Scientist of

Uber Uber Technologies, Inc. (Uber), based in San Francisco, provides mobility as a service, ride-hailing (allowing users to book a car and driver to transport them in a way similar to a taxi), food delivery (Uber Eats and Postmates), packa ...

from 2016 until 2020. He joined

Google Brain Google Brain is a deep learning artificial intelligence research team under the umbrella of Google AI, a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence. Formed in 2011, Google Brain combines open-ended machine learning research ...

in 2020 as senior research director. He is also Deputy Director of the

Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI) is an interdisciplinary research centre within the University of Cambridge that studies artificial intelligence. It is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The Centre brings together academ ...

Education

Ghahramani was educated at the American School of Madrid in

Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = ''Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , i ...

and the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

where he was awarded a

double major A double degree program, sometimes called a dual degree, combined degree, conjoint degree, joint degree or double graduation program, involves a student's working for two university degrees in parallel—either at the same institution or at diffe ...

degree in Cognitive Science and

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

in 1990. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

, supervised by Michael I. Jordan and

Tomaso Poggio Tomaso Armando Poggio (born 11 September 1947 in Genoa, Italy), is the Eugene McDermott professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, a member of the MIT Computer Scien ...

Research and career

Following his Ph.D., Ghahramani moved to the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 ...

in 1995 as a

Postdoctoral Fellow A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). The ultimate goal of a postdoctoral research position is to p ...

in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, working with

Geoffrey Hinton Geoffrey Everest Hinton One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on a ...

. From 1998 to 2005, he was a member of the faculty at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit,

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

. Ghahramani has made significant contributions in the areas of Bayesian machine learning (particularly

variational methods The calculus of variations (or Variational Calculus) is a field of mathematical analysis that uses variations, which are small changes in functions and functionals, to find maxima and minima of functionals: mappings from a set of functions t ...

for approximate Bayesian inference), as well as

graphical models ''Graphical Models'' is an academic journal in computer graphics and geometry processing publisher by Elsevier. , its editor-in-chief is Jorg Peters of the University of Florida. History This journal has gone through multiple names. Founded in 1 ...

and

computational neuroscience Computational neuroscience (also known as theoretical neuroscience or mathematical neuroscience) is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematical models, computer simulations, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to u ...

. His current research focuses on nonparametric Bayesian modelling and statistical machine learning. He has also worked on

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...

, information retrieval, bioinformatics and statistics which provide the mathematical foundations for handling uncertainty, making decisions, and designing learning systems. He has published over 200 papers, receiving over 80,000 citations (an

h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with obvious success indicators such as ...

of 120). He co-founded Geometric Intelligence in 2014, with Gary Marcus, Doug Bemis, and Ken Stanley, which was acquired by Uber in 2016. Afterwards, he transferred to Uber's AI Labs in 2016, and later became Chief Scientist at Uber, replacing Gary Marcus. In 2020 he joined Google and became the Sr. Director of

in April 2021 after

Samy Bengio Samy Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, Senior Director of AI and Machine Learning Research at Apple, and a former long-time scientist at Google known for leading a large group of researchers working in machine learning including adversari ...

's departure.

Awards and honors

Ghahramani was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: His certificate of election reads: He was awarded the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

Milner Award The Royal Society Milner Award, formally the Royal Society Milner Award and Lecture, is awarded annually by the Royal Society, a London-based learned society, for "outstanding achievement in computer science by a European researcher". The award ...

in 2021 in recognition of ‘his fundamental contributions to probabilistic machine learning’.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Ghahramani, Zoubin 1970 births Machine learning researchers Artificial intelligence researchers Living people Members of the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering British people of Iranian descent Iranian engineers Carnegie Mellon University faculty Academics of University College London Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni Fellows of St John's College, Cambridge Fellows of the Royal Society Uber people Engineering professors at the University of Cambridge