Nando de Freitas

Nando de Freitas is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Linacre College. He holds adjunct appointments at UBC Computer Science. His research focuses on machine learning, deep learning, Bayesian optimization, and reinforcement learning, with applications in robotics, computer vision, and AI systems. He co-founded Dark Blue Labs (acquired by Google) and Zite (acquired by CNN), demonstrating impactful industry collaborations.

Education: PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge (2000); postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley (1999–2001); full-time professor at University of British Columbia (2001–2014). Current roles include lead research scientist at DeepMind and CIFAR Fellow in Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception.

• Key research areas: Deep learning theory, reinforcement learning, transfer learning, and probabilistic models.
• Teaching: Courses on unsupervised feature learning (UCLA 2012), machine learning, Monte Carlo methods, and deep learning.

Notable awards include the Charles A. McDowell Award (2012), MITACS Young Researcher Award (2010), and best paper awards at IJCAI, ICLR, and ICML.

• Advising: Supervised over 20 PhD students, including Yannis Assael, Misha Denil, and Ziyu Wang.
• Grants: Extensive funding from CIFAR, MITACS, and industry partnerships (Samsung, AWS, Google).

Labs/Teams: Co-founded Dark Blue Labs (acquired by Google), leading to innovations in probabilistic AI systems. Active in the Oxford DeepMind collaboration, advancing foundational AI research.