About
Richard Zemel is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he has been since 2000. He holds an Industrial Research Chair in Machine Learning and co-founded the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. His research focuses on machine learning, including unsupervised learning, deep learning, and ethical AI, with contributions to probabilistic models, fairness, and representation learning. Zemel has developed influential systems like the Toronto Paper Matching System and holds awards such as the NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award and multiple NSERC grants.
Education: B.Sc. in History & Science from Harvard University (1984), Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto (1993). Postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute and Carnegie Mellon University.
Research Interests: Machine Learning (unsupervised/deep learning), probabilistic models, fairness in algorithms, computer vision, natural language processing. He emphasizes ethical AI and practical applications like recommendation systems and causal inference.
Awards & Affiliations: Fellow of CIFAR, member of the Neural Information Processing Society (NIPS) Executive Board, and advisor to the Creative Destruction Lab. His work is funded by NSERC, CIFAR, Google, Microsoft, and DARPA.
Grants & Labs: Active in grants supporting machine learning research, including projects on fairness and invariant learning. Collaborates with industry partners and leads teams at the University of Toronto and Vector Institute.
