Andrew Ng Personal Profile
Andrew Yan-Tak Ng (1976– ) is a British-born American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Andrew Ng is the co-founder and head of Google Brain and was formerly the Chief Scientist at Baidu, where he built Baidu's AI group into a team of thousands.
Andrew Ng is an adjunct professor at Stanford University (formerly an associate professor and director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or SAIL). AsCourseraanddeeplearning.aico-founder, Andrew Ng has also made enormous contributions to the field of online education. He led many efforts and, through his online courses, taught more than 2.5 million students machine learning and deep learning. He is one of the world's most famous and influential computer scientists, was named one of the 100 most influential people by Time magazine in 2012, and was named one of the most creative people by Fast Company in 2014. In 2018, he launched the AI Fund, of which he is currently the head, initially a $175 million investment fund to support AI startups. He founded Landing AI, which provides AI-powered SaaS products.
Early Life and Education
Andrew Ng was born in the United Kingdom in 1976. His parents, Ronald P. Ng and Tisa Ho, both emigrated from Hong Kong, China. While growing up, he spent time in Hong Kong and Singapore, and later graduated from Raffles Institution in Singapore in 1992.
In 1997, he received his undergraduate degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, majoring in three subjects—computer science, statistics, and economics—and graduated first in his class. Between 1996 and 1998, he also conducted research on reinforcement learning, model selection, and feature selection at AT&T Bell Labs.
In 1998, Andrew received his master's degree at 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, a predecessor of CiteSeerX/ResearchIndex, but specifically for machine learning.
In 2002, he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Michael I. Jordan. His dissertation was titled “Shaping and Policy Search in Reinforcement Learning” and is still widely cited today. He began as an assistant professor at Stanford University in 2002 and became an associate professor in 2009.
Academic and Work Experience
Andrew Ng is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He served as director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), where he taught students and conducted research related to data mining, big data, and machine learning. His machine learning course CS229 at Stanford is one of the most popular courses on campus, with more than 1,000 students enrolling in some years. As of 2020, three of the most popular courses on Coursera are taught by Andrew Ng: “Machine Learning” (No. 1), “AI for Everyone” (No. 5), and “Neural Networks and Deep Learning” (No. 6).
In 2008, his group at Stanford University was one of the earliest groups in the United States to advocate the use of GPUs in deep learning. The rationale was that efficient computing infrastructure could speed up the training of statistical models by several orders of magnitude and improve some of the scaling problems associated with big data. At the time, this was a controversial and risky decision, but since then, under Andrew Ng's leadership, GPUs have become a cornerstone of the field. Since 2017, Andrew Ng has advocated a shift to high-performance computing (HPC) to scale up deep learning and accelerate progress in the field.
In 2012, he co-founded Coursera with Stanford University computer scientist Daphne Koller and served as CEO. It is a website that offers free online courses to everyone. At its founding, more than 100,000 students enrolled in his popular CS229A course. Today, millions of people have enrolled in Coursera courses, making the site one of the world's leading massive open online courses (MOOCs).
From 2011 to 2012, he worked at Google, where, together with Jeff Dean, Greg Corrado, and Rajat Monga, he founded and led the Google Brain deep learning project.
In 2014, he joined Baidu as chief scientist to conduct research related to big data and artificial intelligence. There, he established several research teams, such as facial recognition and the AI chatbot Melody for healthcare. In March 2017, he announced his departure from Baidu.
Shortly afterward, he launched Deeplearning.ai, an online series of deep learning courses. Then, Andrew Ng launched Landing AI, which provides AI-driven SaaS products.
In January 2018, Andrew Ng announced the AI Fund, raising $175 million to invest in new startups. In November 2021, Landing AI received a $57 million Series A funding round led by McRock Capital to help manufacturers apply computer vision.
Awards and Honors
- Bell Atlantic Network Services Fellowship (1995)
- Microsoft Technical Fellowship (1995 and 1996)
- Andrew Carnegie Society Fellowship (1996)
- Berkeley Fellowship (1998-2000)
- Microsoft Research Fellowship (2001 to 2002)
- Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship (2007)
- MIT Technology Review, 35 Innovators Under 35 (TR35) (2008)
- International Artificial Intelligence Computers and Thought Award (the highest award in artificial intelligence for researchers under 35) (2009)
- Vance D. & Arlene C. Coffman Faculty Scholar Award (2009)
- TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential People (2013)
- Fortune magazine's 40 Under 40 Business Leaders (2013)
- Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business (2014)
- World Economic Forum Young Global Leader (2015)