Zoubin Ghahramani (Persian: زوبین قهرمانی; born 8 February 1970) is a British-Iranian researcher in Machine learning and Artificial intelligence. He is Vice President of Research at Google DeepMind and Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge, where he has been a Fellow of St John's College since 2009. He is known for contributions to Bayesian machine learning, including variational methods for approximate inference, and has held leadership roles at Uber and Google.
Ghahramani's career spans academia and industry. He was Chief Scientist at Uber from 2016 to 2020, and later headed Google Brain until its merger with DeepMind. He has also been a founding Cambridge Liaison Director of the Alan Turing Institute and founding Deputy Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.
Education and early career
Ghahramani was educated at the American School of Madrid and the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a dual degree in Cognitive Science and Computer Science in 1990. He obtained his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, supervised by Michael I. Jordan and Tomaso Poggio. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto with Geoffrey Hinton in 1995, he joined the faculty at University College London's Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit from 1998 to 2005. He also held an appointment as Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University from 2003 to 2012.
Research contributions
Ghahramani's research focuses on Bayesian nonparametric modelling, graphical models, and computational neuroscience. He has developed approximate variational inference algorithms for scalable learning and pioneered semi-supervised learning, active learning, and sparse Gaussian processes. His work on infinite-dimensional models, such as the infinite latent feature model, has been highly influential. He has published over 300 papers with more than 100,000 citations and an h-index of 132.
Industry leadership
In 2014, Ghahramani co-founded Geometric Intelligence with Gary Marcus, Doug Bemis, and Ken Stanley. The startup was acquired by Uber in 2016, leading to his role as VP of AI and Chief Scientist at Uber. At Uber, he oversaw AI research and applications in ride-hailing and autonomous vehicles. In 2020, he joined Google Brain as Senior Research Director, became VP of Research in 2021, and led Google Brain until its merger with DeepMind in April 2023.
Policy and advisory roles
Ghahramani contributed to the Royal Society's Machine Learning Report in 2017 and led the UK's Future of Compute Review in 2023, advising on national compute infrastructure for AI.
Awards and honors
Ghahramani was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015, with a citation recognizing his fundamental contributions to probabilistic modeling and Bayesian nonparametric approaches. He received the Royal Society Milner Award in 2021 for his contributions to probabilistic machine learning.