Andrew Yan-Tak Ng (Chinese: å³æ©é"; born 1976) is a Chinese American computer scientist. He is the former chief scientist at Baidu, where he led the company's Artificial Intelligence Group. He is an adjunct professor (formerly associate professor) at Stanford University. Ng is also the co-founder and chairman of Coursera, an online education platform.
Biography
Ng was born in the UK in 1976. His parents were both from Hong Kong. He spent time in Hong Kong and Singapore and later graduated from Raffles Institution in Singapore in 1992. In 1997, he received his undergraduate degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Ng earned his master's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1998 and received his PhD from University of California, Berkeley in 2002. He started working at Stanford University during that year and currently lives in Palo Alto, California. He married Carol E. Reiley in 2014.
Career
Andrew was a professor at Stanford University Department of Computer Science. He taught students and undertook research related to data mining and machine learning. From 2011 to 2012, he worked at Google, where he founded and led the Google Brain Deep Learning Project. In 2012, he co-founded Coursera to offer free online courses for everyone. In 2014, he joined Baidu as Chief Scientist, and carried out research related to big data and A.I. In March 2017, he announced his resignation from Baidu.
Research
Ng researches primarily in machine learning and deep learning. His early work includes the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter project, which developed one of the most capable autonomous helicopters in the world, and the STAIR (STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot) project, which resulted in ROS, a widely used open-source robotics software platform.
In 2011, Ng founded the Google Brain project at Google, which developed very large scale artificial neural networks using Google's distributed computer infrastructure. Among its notable results was a neural network trained using deep learning algorithms on 16,000 CPU cores, that learned to recognize higher-level concepts, such as cats, after watching only YouTube videos, and without ever having been told what a "cat" is. The project's technology is currently also used in the Android Operating System's speech recognition system.
He together with David M. Blei and Michael I. Jordan, coauthored the influential paper that introduced Latent Dirichlet allocation.
Online education
Ng started the Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) program, which in 2008 placed a number of Stanford courses online, for free. Ng taught one of these courses, Machine Learning, which consisted of video lectures by him, along with the student materials used in the Stanford CS229 class.
The "applied" version of the Stanford class (CS229a) was hosted on ml-class.org and started in October 2011, with over 100,000 students registered for its first iteration; the course featured quizzes and graded programming assignments and became one of the first successful MOOCs made by Stanford professors. His work subsequently led to the founding of Coursera in 2012.
Publications and awards
Ng is also the author or co-author of over 100 published papers in machine learning, robotics, and related fields, and some of his work in computer vision has been featured in press releases and reviews. In 2008, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. In 2007, Ng was awarded a Sloan Fellowship. For his work in artificial intelligence, he is also a recipient of the Computers and Thought Award (2009).
See also
- Robot Operating System
References
External links
- Homepage
- STAIR Homepage
- Publications
- Academic Genealogy
- Machine Learning (CS 229) Video Lecture
- Lecture videos
- From Self-Flying Helicopters to Classrooms of the Future
- Coursera-Leadership