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 Fastmail is an Email hosting service, email hosting company based in Melbourne, Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. In addition to its Fastmail-branded services, the company also operates Topicbox, a Electronic mailing list, mailing list service, and ...

, Optimal Decisions Group, and Enlitic. He was President and Chief Scientist of

Kaggle Kaggle is a data science competition platform and online community for data science, data scientists and machine learning practitioners under Google LLC. Kaggle enables users to find and publish datasets, explore and build models in a web-based d ...

. Early in the

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In January 2020, the disease spread worldwide, resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic. The symptoms of COVID‑19 can vary but often include fever ...

epidemic he was a leading advocate for masking.

Early life

Howard was born in

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

, and moved to

Melbourne Melbourne ( , ; Boonwurrung language, Boonwurrung/ or ) is the List of Australian capital cities, capital and List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city of the States and territories of Australia, Australian state of Victori ...

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...

in 1976. He attended Melbourne Grammar and studied philosophy at the

University of Melbourne The University of Melbourne (colloquially known as Melbourne University) is a public university, public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in the state ...

Career

Howard started his career in management consulting, working at 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 high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

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 Fastmail is an Email hosting service, email hosting company based in Melbourne, Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. In addition to its Fastmail-branded services, the company also operates Topicbox, a Electronic mailing list, mailing list service, and ...

, which he sold to

Opera Software Opera (formerly Opera Software AS) is a Norwegian multinational technology corporation headquartered in Oslo, Norway with additional offices in European Union, Europe, China, and Africa. Opera offers a range of products and services that inclu ...

, 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 o ...

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'' is a bi-monthly American magazine that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. It is published in both print and Online magazine, online editions by Condé Nast. The magazine has been in public ...

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. Background The magazine is written primarily by McKinsey consultants and alumni, with contributions from guest authors. Founded in 1964, it ...

, 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 study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

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

deep Learning Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that focuses on utilizing multilayered neural networks to perform tasks such as classification, regression, and representation learning. The field takes inspiration from biological neuroscience a ...

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 t ...

. He was also a

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

with the

World Economic Forum The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental organization, international advocacy non-governmental organization and think tank, based in Cologny, Canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German ...

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

Khosla Ventures Khosla Ventures is a private American venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California. It was founded by entrepreneur Vinod Khosla in 2004. The firm works with early-stage companies in the Internet, computing, mobile technology, artifici ...

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

Deep Learning Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that focuses on utilizing multilayered neural networks to perform tasks such as classification, regression, and representation learning. The field takes inspiration from biological neuroscience a ...

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

University of Queensland The University of Queensland is a Public university, public research university located primarily in Brisbane, the capital city of the Australian state of Queensland. Founded in 1909 by the Queensland parliament, UQ is one of the six sandstone ...

, 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 university, private Society of Jesus, Jesuit university in San Francisco, California, United States. Founded in 1855, it has nearly 9,000 students pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees ...

, 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 technique in machine learning (ML) in which knowledge learned from a task is re-used in order to boost performance on a related task. For example, for image classification, knowledge gained while learning to recogniz ...

and fine-tuning techniques in

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

, and contributing to the development of modern

language model A language model is a model of the human brain's ability to produce natural language. Language models are useful for a variety of tasks, including speech recognition, machine translation,Andreas, Jacob, Andreas Vlachos, and Stephen Clark (2013)"S ...

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, at the start of the Sun path. The term can also refer to the entire process of the solar disk crossing the horizon. Terminology Although the S ...

''.

References

External links

*
Personal bio at Singularity University

Jeremy Howard: The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learn
at TED
Howard's machine-learning startup, Enlitic

Interviews

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