Zoubin Ghahramani FRS (; 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 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 ...
. He holds joint appointments at
University College London
University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...
Fellow
A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...
of
St John's College, Cambridge
St John's College, formally the College of St John the Evangelist in the University of Cambridge, is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge, founded by the House of Tudor, Tudor matriarch L ...
since 2009. He was Associate Research Professor at
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...
School of Computer Science from 2003 to 2012. He was also the Chief Scientist of
Uber
Uber Technologies, Inc. is an American multinational transportation company that provides Ridesharing company, ride-hailing services, courier services, food delivery, and freight transport. It is headquartered in San Francisco, California, a ...
from 2016 until 2020. He joined
Google Brain
Google Brain was a deep learning artificial intelligence research team that served as the sole AI branch of Google before being incorporated under the newer umbrella of Google AI, a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence ...
Spain
Spain, or the Kingdom of Spain, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe with territories in North Africa. Featuring the Punta de Tarifa, southernmost point of continental Europe, it is the largest country in Southern Eur ...
and the
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...
Cognitive Science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include percep ...
and
Computer Science
Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...
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 university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university whose main campus is located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded by ...
in 1995 as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, working with
Geoffrey Hinton
Geoffrey Everest Hinton (born 1947) is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and cognitive psychologist known for his work on artificial neural networks, which earned him the title "the Godfather of AI".
Hinton is Univer ...
. From 1998 to 2005, he was a member of the faculty at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit,
University College London
University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...
.
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
A graphical model or probabilistic graphical model (PGM) or structured probabilistic model is a probabilistic model for which a graph expresses the conditional dependence structure between random variables. Graphical models are commonly used i ...
and
computational neuroscience
Computational neuroscience (also known as theoretical neuroscience or mathematical neuroscience) is a branch of neuroscience which employs mathematics, computer science, theoretical analysis and abstractions of the brain to understand th ...
. His current research focuses on nonparametric Bayesian modelling and statistical machine learning. He has also worked on
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 ...
,
information retrieval
Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an Information needs, information need. The information need can be specified in the form ...
,
bioinformatics
Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and Bioinformatics software, software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, ...
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 success indicators such as winning t ...
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
Google Brain
Google Brain was a deep learning artificial intelligence research team that served as the sole AI branch of Google before being incorporated under the newer umbrella of Google AI, a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence ...
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 in 2021 in recognition of ‘his fundamental contributions to probabilistic machine learning’.