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Nando de Freitas

Personal photo - Nando de Freitas

Nando de Freitas

Professor of Computer Science

Leaving date: 5th April 2017

Interests

I want to understand intelligence and harness it to extend our minds so that we can better solve challenging problems affecting us all and our environment.

I conduct research in deep learning, and associated areas including transfer learning, abstraction, reinforcement learning, multi-agents, and applications to robotics and all types of data.

Biography

I am a machine learning professor at Oxford University, a lead research scientist at Google DeepMind, and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research (CIFAR) in the successful Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception program.  I received my PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge University in 2000 on Bayesian methods for neural networks. From 1999 to 2001, I was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley in the AI group of Stuart Russell. I was a professor at the University of British Columbia from 2001 to 2014. I have spun off a few companies, most recently Dark Blue Labs acquired by Google. Among my recent awards are best paper awards at IJCAI 2013, ICLR 2016, ICML 2016, and the Yelp Dataset award for a multi-instance transfer learning paper at KDD 2015. I also received the 2012 Charles A. McDowell Award for Excellence in Research, and the 2010 Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems (MITACS) Young Researcher Award

PhD/DPhil applicants: Please follow the instructions on our admissions website

Selected Publications

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Activities

Past Students

Yannis Assael
Misha Denil
Jakob Foerster
Aurore Lyon
Marcin Moczulski
Brendan Shillingford