Zoubin Ghahramani

Zoubin Ghahramani
Zoubin Ghahramani in 2015, portrait from the Royal Society
Born	February 8, 1970[1][2] Iran
Residence	United Kingdom
Fields	Machine Learning Bayesian statistics[3]
Institutions	University of Cambridge Carnegie Mellon University University College London University of Toronto[4]
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Thesis	Computation and Psychophysics of Sensorimotor Integration (1995)
Doctoral advisor	Michael I. Jordan Tomaso Poggio[5]
Doctoral students	Matthew Beal[5] Shakir Mohamed[6] Pedro Ortega[7] Ryan Turner[8] Jurgen Van Gael[5]
Known for	Graphical models Variational Bayes Computational neuroscience
Notable awards	FRS (2015)[9]
Website mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/zoubin/

Zoubin Ghahramani FRS^[9] (Persian: زوبین قهرمانی‎‎; born 8 February 1970)^[1] is an Iranian researcher^[3][10] and Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He holds joint appointments at Carnegie Mellon University, University College London and the Alan Turing Institute.

Education

Ghahramani obtained his Ph.D from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the supervision of Michael I. Jordan.^[5][11] He then went to the University of Toronto in 1995 as a 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.

Research

Ghahramani has made significant contributions in the areas of Bayesian machine learning (particularly variational methods for approximate Bayesian inference), 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, statistics, information retrieval, bioinformatics, 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 (an h-index of 74). ^[12]

Awards and honours

Ghahramani was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015.^[13] His certificate of election reads:

Zoubin Ghahramani is a world leader in the field of machine learning, significantly advancing the state-of-the-art in algorithms that can learn from data. He is known in particular for fundamental contributions to probabilistic modeling and Bayesian nonparametric approaches to machine learning systems, and to the development of approximate variational inference algorithms for scalable learning. He is one of the pioneers of semi-supervised learning methods, active learning algorithms, and sparse Gaussian processes. His development of novel infinite dimensional nonparametric models, such as the infinite latent feature model, has been highly influential.^[9]

References

1. GHAHRAMANI, Prof. Zoubin. Who's Who 2016 (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (subscription required)
2. "Zoubin Ghahramani curriculum vitae" (PDF). User zoubin at CMU. Retrieved 16 April 2014.
3. Zoubin Ghahramani's publications indexed by Google Scholar, a service provided by Google
4. Zoubin Ghahramani from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library
5. Zoubin Ghahramani at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
6. Mohamed, Shakir (2011). Generalised Bayesian matrix factorisation models (PhD thesis). University of Cambridge.
7. Ortega, Pedro Alejandro (2011). A unified framework for resource-bounded autonomous agents interacting with unknown environments (PhD thesis). University of Cambridge.
8. Turner, Ryan Darby (2012). Gaussian processes for state space models and change point detection (PhD thesis). University of Cambridge.
9. "Professor Zoubin Ghahramani FRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2015-05-02.
10. Ghahramani, Z. (2015). "Probabilistic machine learning and artificial intelligence". Nature 521 (7553): 452–9. doi:10.1038/nature14541. PMID 26017444.
11. Jordan, M. I.; Ghahramani, Z.; Jaakkola, T. S.; Saul, L. K. (1999). "An Introduction to Variational Methods for Graphical Models". Machine Learning 37 (2): 183–233. doi:10.1023/A:1007665907178.
12. Wolpert, D. M.; Ghahramani, Z; Jordan, M. I. (1995). "An internal model for sensorimotor integration". Science (New York) 269 (5232): 1880–2. doi:10.1126/science.7569931. PMID 7569931.
13. "Professor Zoubin Ghahramani FRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2015-11-17. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:

    “All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies at the Wayback Machine (archived September 25, 2015)