Zoubin Ghahramani FRS (Persian: زوبین قهرمانی) was born on February 8, 1970. He is a British-Iranian researcher who studies machine learning and artificial intelligence. He is the Vice President of Research at Google DeepMind and a Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Since 2009, he has been a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. From 1998 to 2005, he worked at University College London. From 2003 to 2012, he was a Research Professor in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. From 2016 to 2020, he worked as Chief Scientist at Uber. In 2020, he joined Google Brain as Senior Research Director. In 2021, he became Vice President of Research and led Google Brain until it merged with DeepMind to form Google DeepMind. He was a founding Cambridge Liaison Director of the Alan Turing Institute and a founding Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.
In 2017, Ghahramani helped write the Royal Society's Machine Learning Report. In 2023, he led the UK's Future of Compute Review.
Education
Ghahramani attended the American School of Madrid in Spain and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a dual degree in Cognitive Science and Computer Science in 1990. He earned his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, supervised by Michael I. Jordan and Tomaso Poggio.
Research and career
After earning his Ph.D., Ghahramani joined the University of Toronto in 1995 as a 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 at University College London.
Ghahramani has made important contributions in areas such as Bayesian machine learning (especially methods for estimating probabilities in complex models), graphical models, and computational neuroscience. His current research focuses on Bayesian models that can adapt to different data sizes and statistical machine learning. He has also worked in fields like artificial intelligence, searching for information online, and analyzing biological data, which help create systems that handle uncertainty, make decisions, and learn from information. He has written more than 300 research papers, which have been cited over 100,000 times (an h-index of 132).
He started a company called Geometric Intelligence in 2014 with Gary Marcus, Doug Bemis, and Ken Stanley. Uber bought the company in 2016. Ghahramani then joined Uber's AI Labs in 2016 and later became Vice President of AI and Chief Scientist at Uber. In 2020, he started working at Google as Vice President of Research and head of Google Brain. He held this position until Google Brain merged with DeepMind in April 2023.
Awards and honors
Ghahramani was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015. His certificate of election states: He was awarded the Royal Society Milner Award in 2021 for "his important work in probabilistic machine learning."