Professor Michael Bronstein appointed as DeepMind Professor of Artificial Intelligence

We are very happy to announce the appointment of Professor Michael Bronstein to the DeepMind Professorship of Artificial Intelligence. He will join our department with effect from 1 January 2022. He will also be a Fellow of Exeter College.

Michael joins from Imperial College London, where he has held the Chair in Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition for the past three years while serving as the Head of Graph Learning Research at Twitter. Previously, Michael had visiting appointments at MIT, Stanford, and Harvard universities and was a Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Michael is a world leader in geometrically-inspired machine learning, a field that has recently seen a broad adoption ranging from recommender systems to drug design. He is a Member of Academia Europaea, Fellow of IEEE, and a recipient of multiple ERC grants, Google Faculty Research awards, Amazon ML Research awards, Facebook Computational Social Science award, Dalle Molle prize, Royal Society Wolfson Merit award, and Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal.

Michael says, ‘I am honoured and delighted to join Oxford, which has unparalleled expertise in AI and related fields and amazing students. I am looking forward to forging new collaborations and synergies within the Department and beyond that would allow us to develop the next generation of machine learning methods that solve real-world problems and at the same time have the trust of domain experts and the broader public.’

This chair is generously supported by DeepMind, the world-leading British AI company.

Obum Ekeke, Global Lead of University Relations and Education Partnerships, DeepMind, said ‘Congratulations to Michael on his appointment as the DeepMind Professor in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Oxford. Michael is an excellent researcher with deep experience working across academia and industry simultaneously, and we’re delighted to support him in this new position. I have no doubt that Michael will contribute further to Oxford’s distinguished work in the field, and add enormously to the development of the next generation of AI researchers.'

Professor Leslie Ann Goldberg, Head of Department of Computer Science comments, ‘We are delighted by this appointment. Michael is a world-leading researcher whose research has already had a huge impact across the increasingly important area of machine learning. His research is important both theoretically and because of its many applications.  Our students will be very excited by the opportunity to learn from Michael. We are extremely grateful to DeepMind for supporting a Chair in this very significant area.'

The Head of Exeter College, Rector Professor Sir Rick Trainor, said, ‘Exeter College is delighted by the appointment to the DeepMind Chair of Michael Bronstein, a leading scholar and innovator in the field of AI. As a professorial fellow of Exeter, Professor Bronstein’s work will be closely related to that of a number of Exeter colleagues, including Professors Luciano Floridi (Philosophy and Ethics of Information), Michael Osborne (Machine Learning) and Jared Tanner (Mathematics of Information). In addition to interacting with these scholars in cognate fields, Professor Bronstein will have the opportunity to serve as adviser to the substantial number of Exeter graduate students with interests connected to his own.’

You can find out more about Michael here:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/m.bronstein