Pushmeet Kohli is an

Indian British British Indians are citizens of the United Kingdom (UK) whose ancestral roots are from India. Currently, the British Indian population exceeds 2 million people in the UK, making them the single largest visible ethnic minority populatio ...

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

and

Vice President A vice president or vice-president, also director in British English, is an officer in government or business who is below the president (chief executive officer) in rank. It can also refer to executive vice presidents, signifying that the vi ...

of research at

Google DeepMind DeepMind Technologies Limited, trading as Google DeepMind or simply DeepMind, is a British–American artificial intelligence research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Goo ...

. At Deepmind, he heads the "Science and Strategic Initiatives Unit". He was noted by

Time magazine ''Time'' (stylized in all caps as ''TIME'') is an American news magazine based in New York City. It was published weekly for nearly a century. Starting in March 2020, it transitioned to every other week. It was first published in New York Cit ...

as being one of the 100 most influential people in AI according to th
Time 100 AI
list. He has led and supervised a number of projects including

AlphaFold AlphaFold is an artificial intelligence (AI) program developed by DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, which performs predictions of protein structure. It is designed using deep learning techniques. AlphaFold 1 (2018) placed first in the overall ...

, a system for predicting the 3D structures of proteins;

AlphaEvolve AlphaEvolve is an evolutionary coding agent for designing advanced algorithms based on large language models such as Gemini. It was developed by Google DeepMind and unveiled in May 2025. Design AlphaEvolve aims to autonomously discover and ref ...

, a general-purpose evolutionary coding agent; SynthID, a system for

watermarking A watermark is a recognizable image or pattern in paper used to determine authenticity. Watermark or watermarking may also refer to: Technology * Digital watermarking, a technique to embed data in digital audio, images or video ** Audio waterma ...

and detecting AI-generated content; and Co-Scientist, an agent for generating and testing new scientific hypotheses.

Education

Kohli received a

BTech A Bachelor of Technology (BTech) is an undergraduate degree that is awarded for a higher education program in engineering. Countries Australia In Australia, the Bachelor of Technology degree is offered by RMIT University, Edith Cowan Univ ...

in Computer Science and Engineering at the

National Institute of Technology, Warangal The National Institute of Technology Warangal (NIT-Warangal or NIT-W) is a public technical and research university located in Warangal, India. It is recognised as an Institute of National Importance by the Government of India. The foundation s ...

. He went on to study at

Oxford Brookes University Oxford Brookes University (OBU; formerly known as Oxford Polytechnic) is a public university, public university in Oxford, England. It is a new university, having received university status through the Further and Higher Education Act 1992. Th ...

, where he earned a PhD in

computer vision Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...

under Philip Torr in 2007. Kohli was also a postdoctoral associate at the Psychometric Centre,

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

Career

Before joining Google DeepMind, Pushmeet Kohli was partner scientist and director of research at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

. His research investigates applications of

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 ( ...

and

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

. Pushmeet has made research contributions in the fields of

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of techniques in computer science, data analysis, mathematical modeling and Computer simulation, computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer sci ...

program synthesis In computer science, program synthesis is the task to construct a computer program, program that provably correct, provably satisfies a given high-level formal specification. In contrast to program verification, the program is to be constructed rat ...

superoptimization Superoptimization is the process where a compiler automatically finds the optimal sequence for a loop-free sequence of instructions. Real-world compilers generally cannot produce genuinely ''optimal'' code, and while most standard compiler optimi ...

discrete optimization Discrete optimization is a branch of optimization in applied mathematics and computer science. As opposed to continuous optimization, some or all of the variables used in a discrete optimization problem are restricted to be discrete variables&mda ...

, and

psychometrics Psychometrics is a field of study within psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement. Psychometrics generally covers specialized fields within psychology and education devoted to testing, measurement, assessment, and rela ...

Notable Research Projects

- breakthrough AI system for protein structure prediction *

- agent for code super optimization.
AlphaTensor
- Reinforcement learning agent for discovering new algorithms for matrix multiplication
SynthID
- system for watermarking AI generated images.
AlphaGenome
an
AlphaMissense
- AI models for predicting the effect of mutations in the genome
AlphaCode
- Competition-level code generation with AI
FunSearch
- Discovering algorithms using LLMs to search over program space. *Neural Program Synthesis *Probabilistic Programming * Community based Crowdsourcing of Data for Training AI Models * Behavioral analysis and personality prediction using on online networks * Human Pose Estimation using the Kinect * Learnt Magnetic confinement control for Fusion * Learnt Density Functional for solving the fractional electron problem

Awards and honours

Pushmeet's research in computer vision and machine learning has been recognized by a number of scientific awards and prizes. Some notable ones include: * Koenderink Prize (Test of Time award) by the European Conference of Computer Vision * British Machine Vision Association and Society for Pattern Recognition (BMVA) Sullivan Prize for the best PhD thesis. * IEEE Mixed Augmented Reality (ISMAR) Impact Paper award * Lasting Impact Award by the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology * Best paper award at the International World Wide Web Conference 2014 * Best paper award in the

European Conference on Computer Vision The European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) is a biennial research conference with the proceedings published by Springer Science+Business Media. Similar to ICCV in scope and quality, it is held those years which ICCV is not. It is consider ...

(ECCV) 2010 * Best paper award in the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kohli, Pushmeet Indian computer scientists Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Microsoft employees Scientists from Cambridge Alumni of Oxford Brookes University National Institutes of Technology alumni Computer vision researchers Machine learning researchers DeepMind people