Andrew Ng

Andrew Yan-Tak Ng (born 1976) is a British-American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

Ng was a cofounder and head of Google Brain and was the former Chief Scientist at Baidu, building the company's Artificial Intelligence Group into a team of several thousand people.

Ng is an adjunct professor at Stanford University (formerly associate professor and Director of its Stanford AI Lab or SAIL).

Ng has also worked in the field of online education, cofounding Coursera and DeepLearning.AI.

He has spearheaded many efforts to "democratize deep learning" teaching over 2.5 million students through his online courses.

Ng was born in the United Kingdom in 1976.

His parents Ronald P. Ng and Tisa Ho are both immigrants from Hong Kong.

He has at least one brother.

Growing up, he spent time in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Between 1996 and 1998 he also conducted research on reinforcement learning, model selection, and feature selection at the AT&T Bell Labs.

In 1997, he earned his undergraduate degree with a triple major in computer science, statistics, and economics from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, graduating at the top of his class.

In 1998 Ng earned his master's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

At MIT he built the first publicly available, automatically indexed web-search engine for research papers on the web.

It was a precursor to CiteSeerX/ResearchIndex, but specialized in machine learning.

In 2002, he received his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Michael I. Jordan.

His thesis is titled "Shaping and policy search in reinforcement learning" and is well-cited to this day.

He started working as an assistant professor at Stanford University in 2002 and as an associate professor in 2009.

He currently lives in Los Altos Hills, California.

In 2008 his group at Stanford was one of the first in the US to start advocating the use of GPUs in deep learning.

The rationale was that an efficient computation infrastructure could speed up statistical model training by orders of magnitude, ameliorating some of the scaling issues associated with big data.

At the time it was a controversial and risky decision, but since then and following Ng's lead, GPUs have become a cornerstone in the field.

From 2011 to 2012, he worked at Google, where he founded and directed the Google Brain Deep Learning Project with Jeff Dean, Greg Corrado, and Rajat Monga.

Ng is renowned globally in computer science, recognized in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2012 and Fast Company's Most Creative People in 2014.

His influence extends to being named in the Time100 AI Most Influential People in 2023.

In 2012, along with Stanford computer scientist Daphne Koller he cofounded and was CEO of Coursera, a website that offers free online courses to everyone.

It took off with over 100,000 students registered for Ng's popular CS229A course.

Today, several million people have enrolled in Coursera courses, making the site one of the leading massive open online courses (MOOCs) in the world.

In 2014, he married Carol E. Reiley.

In 2014, he joined Baidu as chief scientist, and carried out research related to big data and AI.

There he set up several research teams for things like facial recognition and Melody, an AI chatbot for healthcare.

He also developed for the company the AI platform called DuerOS and other technologies that positioned Baidu ahead of Google in the discourse and development of AI.

Since 2017, Ng has been advocating the shift to high-performance computing (HPC) for scaling up deep learning and accelerating progress in the field.

In 2018, he launched and currently heads the AI Fund, initially a $175-million investment fund for backing artificial intelligence startups.

He has founded Landing AI, which provides AI-powered SaaS products.

They have two children: a daughter born in 2019 and a son born in 2021.

The MIT Technology Review named Ng and Reiley an "AI power couple".

Ng is a professor at Stanford University departments of Computer Science and electrical engineering.

He served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), where he taught students and undertook research related to data mining, big data, and machine learning.

His machine learning course CS229 at Stanford is the most popular course offered on campus with over 1,000 students enrolling some years.

As of 2020, three of most popular courses on Coursera are Ng's: Machine Learning (#1), AI for Everyone (#5), Neural Networks and Deep Learning (#6).