Daphne Koller


Daphne Koller is an Israeli-American who was a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and a MacArthur Fellowship recipient. She is one of the founders of Coursera, an online education platform. Her general research area is artificial intelligence and its applications in the biomedical sciences. Koller was featured in a 2004 article by MIT Technology Review titled "10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World" concerning the topic of Bayesian machine learning.

Education

Koller received a bachelor's degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1985, at the age of 17, and a master's degree from the same institution in 1986, at the age of 18. She completed her PhD at Stanford in 1993 under the supervision of Joseph Halpern.

Career and research

After her PhD, Koller did postdoctoral research at University of California, Berkeley from 1993 to 1995, and joined the faculty of the Stanford University Computer Science Department in 1995. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2004, was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014.
In April 2008, Koller was awarded the first ever $150,000 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences.
She and Andrew Ng, a fellow Stanford computer science professor in the AI lab, launched Coursera in 2012. She served as the co-CEO with Ng, and then as President of Coursera. She was recognized for her contributions to online education by being named one of Newsweeks 10 Most Important People in 2010, Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2012, and Fast Companys Most Creative People in 2014.
She left Coursera in 2016 to become chief computing officer at Calico. In 2018, she left Calico to start and lead Insitro, a drug discovery startup.
Koller is primarily interested in representation, inference, learning, and decision making, with a focus on applications to computer vision and computational biology. Along with Suchi Saria and Anna Penn of Stanford University, Koller developed PhysiScore, which uses various data elements to predict whether premature babies are likely to have health issues.
In 2009, she published a textbook on probabilistic graphical models together with Nir Friedman. She offered a free online course on the subject starting in February 2012.
Her former doctoral students include Lise Getoor, Mehran Sahami, Suchi Saria, Eran Segal, and Ben Taskar.

Honors and awards

Her honors and awards include:
Koller contributed one chapter to the 2018 book Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it by the American futurist Martin Ford.

Personal life

Koller is married to Dan Avida, a venture capitalist at Opus Capital.