Zoubin Ghahramani


Zoubin Ghahramani FRS is a British-Iranian researcher and Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He holds joint appointments at University College London and the Alan Turing Institute. and has been a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge since 2009. He was Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science from 2003-2012. He is also the Chief Scientist of Uber and Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.

Education

Ghahramani was educated at the American School of Madrid in Spain and the University of Pennsylvania where he was awarded a double major degree in Cognitive Science and Computer Science in 1990. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, supervised by Michael I. Jordan and Tomaso Poggio.

Research and career

Following his PhD, Ghahramani moved to the University of Toronto in 1995 as an ITRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, working with Geoffrey Hinton. From 1998 to 2005, he was a member of the faculty at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London.
Ghahramani has made significant contributions in the areas of Bayesian machine learning, as well as graphical models and computational neuroscience. His current research focuses on nonparametric Bayesian modelling and statistical machine learning. He has also worked on artificial intelligence, information retrieval, bioinformatics and statistics which provide the mathematical foundations for handling uncertainty, making decisions, and designing learning systems. He has published over 200 papers, receiving over 30,000 citations.
He co-founded Geometric Intelligence company in 2014, with Gary Marcus, Doug Bemis, and Ken Stanley. After Uber's acquisition of the startup he transferred to Uber's A.I. Labs in 2016. Just after four months he became Chief Scientist, replacing Gary Marcus.

Awards and honours

Ghahramani was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2015. His certificate of election reads: