Andrew Ng

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The Chinese language scientist Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is a manager, investor and entrepreneur. Ng was a co-founder and leader of Google Brain and a former chief scientist in Baidu and several thousand members of the company’s Artificial Intelligence Group. He is an associate professor at the University of Stanford. Ng is also a first pioneer in online education, leading to Coursera and deeplearning.ai’s co-foundation. He has set up and manages AI Fund, an investment fund of $175 million to support artificial intelligence start-ups.

Ng was born in the United Kingdom in London in 1976. His parents were both Hong Kong parents. He spent time in Hong Kong and Singapore and later graduated in 1992 from Singapore’s Raffles Institution. In 1997 he received his undergraduate degree from the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with a three-fold degree in computer science, statistics and economics.

His master’s degree was awarded in 1998 in Cambridge, Massachusetts from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his doctorate was awarded in 2002 at the University of California at Berkeley.

In 2002, he began working at Stanford University.

I’ve been living in Los Altos Hills, California. He married Carol E. Reiley in 2014 and in February 2019 they had their first child, Nova. They were named an AI power couple by MIT Tech Review.

Ng is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He was appointed Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he taught students and researched data mining and machine learning. His Stanford department is one of the most popular on-campus courses with more than 1,000 students enrolled. He worked at Google from 2011 to 2012, where he founded and headed up the GoogleBrain Deep Learning Project. In 2012, he was co-founder and CEO of Coursera which, after registering over 100,000 students for Ng’s popular class, offers free online courses for everybody. Several million people took the online course today. He joined Baidu as chief scientist in 2014 and conducted research on Big Data and A.I. He announced his resignation in March 2017 from Baidu. Shortly thereafter he launched Deeplearning.ai, an online course curriculum. Then Ng launched Landing.ai, which brought AI to factories. In November 2017, Ng held the keynote address at the AI Frontiers Conference. Landing.ai’s first public partnership is with FoxConn.

Ng unveiled the AI fund in January 2018, raising $175 million to invest in new start-ups. He is also the chairman of Woebot and the board member of drive.ai.He has also written a book entitled ‘machine learning,’ which he distributed for free. He followed this up with an AI Transformation Playbook in December 2018.

Ng is mainly engineering and profound learning and is one of the world’s most renowned informaticians. His early work includes the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter project, which developed one of the world’s most capable independent helicopters, and the STAIR project leading to a widely-used open source software platform, ROS.

In 2011, Ng founded Google’s Google Brain project, developing large-scale artificial neural networks that use Google’s distributed computer infrastructure. Among its remarkable results was a neural network trained on 16,000 CPU cores with profound learning algorithms, which learned to recognize cats only after watching YouTube videos and never told what a “cats” was. The technology of the project has also been used in the speech recognition system of the Android operating system. He co-authored the influential paper that introduced Latent Dirichlet allowance with David M. Blei and Michael I. Jordan.

Ng began the Stanford Engineering Everywhere program, where several Stanford courses were free of charge in 2008. Ng taught Machine Learning in one of these courses, which was made up of his video lectures and the student materials used in the Stanford class CS229.

In October 2011 over 100,000 students were registered for their first iteration and the Stanford version was held on ml-class.org, featuring quizzes and graduate programming and one of the first successful MOOCs made by Stanford Professors. His work then led to Coursera’s founding in 2012. His courses are the Top Two Machine Learning Courses, Neural Networks and Deep Learning. Ng has announced a new “AI for everyone” Coursera course in early 2019 which will help people understand the impact of IT on society and how businesses can navigate this technological change. This is a non-technical course by exploring the benefits/limitations of AI and its social impacts for your company.