Michael Osborne (born 1982) is an Australian academic and scientist who serves as a professor 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 ...

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's second-oldest university in contin ...

in the Machine Learning Research Group in the Department of Engineering Science. In 2016 he co-founded Mind Foundry, an

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 ...

company, along with fellow professor Stephen Roberts. Osborne suffered from long COVID syndrome. He is an advocate for masking to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID disease.

Education

He has a

BEng A Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) or a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE) is an academic undergraduate degree awarded to a student after three to five years of studying engineering at an accredited college or university. In the UK, a ...

Mechanical Engineering Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and mathematics principles with materials science, to design, analyze, manufacture, ...

and a

BSc A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University of ...

in both

Pure Mathematics Pure mathematics is the study of mathematical concepts independently of any application outside mathematics. These concepts may originate in real-world concerns, and the results obtained may later turn out to be useful for practical applications ...

and

Physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which rel ...

from the

University of Western Australia The University of Western Australia (UWA) is a public research university in the Australian state of Western Australia. The university's main campus is in Perth, the state capital, with a secondary campus in Albany, Western Australia, Albany an ...

. He has a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper ''Piled Higher and Deeper'' (also known as ''PhD Comics''), is a newsp ...

in Machine Learning from the University of Oxford.

Career

Osborne has contributed to over 100 publications, and his work has received over 24,000

citations A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of ...

with 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 46 according to

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes p ...

. and has acted as principal or co-investigator for £10.6M of research funding. His career has focused in particular on

Bayesian Thomas Bayes (/beɪz/; c. 1701 – 1761) was an English statistician, philosopher, and Presbyterian minister. Bayesian () refers either to a range of concepts and approaches that relate to statistical methods based on Bayes' theorem, or a follower ...

approaches to AI and machine learning, named after the famous British statistician

Thomas Bayes Thomas Bayes ( ; 1701 7 April 1761) was an English statistician, philosopher and Presbyterian minister who is known for formulating a specific case of the theorem that bears his name: Bayes' theorem. Bayes never published what would become h ...

. Osborne's work has contributed to

Probabilistic numerics Probabilistic numerics is a scientific field at the intersection of statistics, machine learning and applied mathematics, where tasks in numerical analysis including finding numerical solutions for integration, linear algebra, optimisation and dif ...

, with Osborne co-authoring the first textbook on the subject. In 2013, Osborne co-authored a paper alongside Swedish-German economist

Carl Benedikt Frey Carl Benedikt Frey is a Swedish-German economist and economic historian. He is Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at Oxford University where he directs the programme on the Future of Work at the Oxford Martin School. Career After studying economics, hi ...

called "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?". The paper has received over 13,000 citations and extensive media coverage. In 2023 Osborne gave oral evidence to the UK

House of Commons The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of parliament. ...

Science and Technology Committee Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

on the subject of the "Governance of Artificial Intelligence". His testimony received significant coverage around his warnings of the threat of "rogue AI".

Honors

He is also an Official Fellow of Exeter College, a Fellow of the ELLIS society, and a Faculty Member of the

Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance The Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance is an interdisciplinary research institute of the University of Oxford, England. The institute was co-founded in June 2007 with Man Group plc. It brings together faculty, post-docs and student ...

. He joined the

Oxford Martin School The Oxford Martin School is a research and policy unit based in the Social Sciences Division of the University of Oxford. It was founded in June 2005 as the James Martin 21st Century School and is located in the original building of the Indian ...

as Lead Researcher on the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment in 2015. He is a Director of the

EPSRC The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical sciences, mainly to unive ...

Centre for Doctoral Training in Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems.

References

External links

Official homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Osborne, Michael 1982 births Living people Machine learning researchers Academics of the University of Oxford British computer scientists Australian academics Fellows of Exeter College, Oxford Alumni of the University of Oxford University of Western Australia alumni