Google & Deepmind Speakers

Demis Hassabis, Founder and CEO of DeepMind

Demis is the founder and CEO of DeepMind, a neuroscience-inspired AI company, bought by Google in Jan 2014 in their largest European acquisition to date. He leads projects including the development of AlphaGo, the first program to ever beat a professional player at the game of Go.

Demis is a former child chess prodigy, who finished his A-levels two years early before coding the multi-million selling simulation game Theme Park aged 17. Following graduation from Cambridge University with a Double First in Computer Science he founded the pioneering videogames company Elixir Studios producing award winning games for global publishers such as Vivendi Universal.

After a decade of experience leading successful technology startups, Demis returned to academia to complete a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at UCL, followed by postdocs at MIT and Harvard, before founding DeepMind. His research connecting memory with imagination was listed in the top ten scientific breakthroughs of 2007 by the journal Science. Demis is a five-time World Games Champion, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and the recipient of the Royal Society’s Mullard Award and the Royal Academy of Engineering's Silver Medal.

Dr. David Silver, Research Scientist and AlphaGo Team Lead

David leads the reinforcement learning research group at Google DeepMind. David graduated from Cambridge University in 1997, achieving the top marks in Computer Science. Subsequently, David co-founded the video game company Elixir Studios, where he was CTO and lead programmer, winning numerous awards for technology and innovation. David returned to academia in 2004 to study for a PhD in reinforcement learning in computer Go, where he co-introduced the algorithms used in the first master-level 9x9 Go programs. David was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2011, and subsequently became a lecturer at University College London. David consulted for DeepMind from its inception, joining full-time in 2013. His recent work has focused on combining reinforcement learning with deep learning, including a program that learns to play Atari games directly from pixels (Nature 2015).

Jeff Dean, Senior Fellow, Google Brain

Jeff joined Google in 1999 and is currently a Google Senior Fellow in Google's Research Group, where he leads the Google Brain team (g.co/brain), Google's deep learning research team in Mountain View, where he works on systems for speech recognition, computer vision, machine translation, language understanding, healthcare, and various artificial intelligence tasks. He has co-designed/implemented five generations of Google's crawling, indexing, and query serving systems, and co-designed/implemented major pieces of Google's initial advertising and AdSense for Content systems.

He is also a co-designer and co-implementor of Google's distributed computing infrastructure, including the MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner and TensorFlow systems, protocol buffers, LevelDB, systems infrastructure for statistical machine translation, and a variety of internal and external libraries and developer tools. He is currently working on large-scale distributed systems for machine learning. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1996, working with Craig Chambers on compiler techniques for object-oriented languages. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the AAAS, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of the Mark Weiser Award and the ACM Prize in Computing.

Jia Li, Head of Research and Design, Cloud and A.I., Google

Jia is the Head of Research and Design, Cloud A.I. and machine learning. Before joining Google, she was the Head of Research at Snapchat, leading the research innovation effort of Snapchat. Prior to that, Jia led the Visual Computing and Learning Group at Yahoo! Labs. Jia received her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. She is serving as the Program Chair of the ACM Multimedia Conference 2017, the Associate Editor of the Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics by Springer and the Computer Vision Foundation Industrial Advisory Board Member.

She served as the Industry Relationship Chair in CVPR 2016, Volunteers Chair in CVPR 2010, and Area Chair for WACV 2015 in the past. In 2014, she was selected to receive the Super Star award at Yahoo!, the highest award at the company. She was also awarded the Master Inventor Award for her innovations in Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Mobile Vision, E-Commerce, Product Recommendation and Image Search. She was the leader of the OPTIMOL team, which won the first prize in the Semantic Robotics Vision Challenge sponsored by NSF and AAAI in 2007. Her work has been widely reported in the media including: The Next Web, Ars Technica, ZDNet, GigaOm, Venture Beat, Mirror, Business Insider, New Scientist and MIT Technology Review in recent years. She was listed as one of the ‘Secret Power Players Who Run Snapchat’ by Business Insider in 2016.

Rajat Monga, Engineering Director, TensorFlow and Google Brain

Rajat leads TensorFlow at the Google Brain team, where he's interested in pushing research forward and democratizing it. Prior to Google, Rajat built out labs and operations at Attributor as the chief architect and director of engineering. A veteran developer, Rajat has worked at eBay, Infosys, and a number of startups.

Dr. Zhifeng Chen, Software Engineer, Google Brain

Zhifeng is a Software Engineer on Google Brain’s TensorFlow team, working on a number of large-scale distributed systems, including the development of Neural Machine Translation in 2016. Before joining the Google brain, Dr. Chen Zhifeng has long been engaged in the design, development and deployment of Google's large-scale distributed systems. He has worked on products such as Google Search, Gmail as well as on the backend systems of several key Google products. Dr. Chen holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Fudan University, a master's degree in computer science from Princeton University and a doctorate in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Mustafa Suleyman, Co-founder, Head of Applied A.I. at DeepMind

Mustafa is co-founder and Head of Applied AI at DeepMind, where he is responsible for integrating the company’s technology across a wide range of Google products. In February 2016 he launched DeepMind Health, which builds clinician-led technology in the NHS. Mustafa was Chief Product Officer at DeepMind Technologies, before the company was bought in 2014 by Google in their largest European acquisition to date. DeepMind was a leading AI company backed by Founders Fund, Li Ka-Shing, Elon Musk, and David Bonderman amongst others.

At 19, Mustafa dropped out of Oxford University to help set up a telephone counselling service, building it to become one of the largest mental health support services of its kind in the UK, and then worked as policy officer for then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. He went on to help start Reos Partners, a consultancy with eight offices across four continents specializing in designing and facilitating large-scale multi-stakeholder ‘Change Labs’ aimed at navigating complex problems. As a skilled negotiator and facilitator Mustafa has worked all over the world for a wide range of clients such as the UN, the Dutch Government and WWF.

Lily Peng, Product Manager, Google Brain

Lily is a non-practicing physician and product manager for a team that works on applying deep learning and other Google’s technologies and expertise to increase access, accuracy, and clinical utility of medical imaging, such as retinal imaging. Here is some of their team’s recent work in JAMA & the TensorFlow Dev Summit and most recently on pathology.

Before Google, she was a product manager at Doximity, the "LinkedIn" for physicians, and a co-founder of Nano Precision Medical (NPM), a medical device start up that is developing a small implantable continuous drug delivery device. She completed her M.D. and Ph.D. in Bioengineering at the University of California, San Francisco and Berkeley. She received her B.S. with honors and distinction in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University.

Pierre Caessa, Program Manager at Google Arts & Culture Lab

Pierre is the Program Manager at Google Arts & Culture Lab since it opened in 2013. Before joining Google, he graduated from Sciences Po Lille and HEC Paris and previously worked at the Cité de la Musique and Universal Music France.