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The 21 smartest AI scientists working at Google DeepMind
Google DeepMind, a group of approximately 200 people aiming to "solve intelligence" in London, is arguably one of the most interesting AI companies operating in the world right now. It made history on March 9 when its "AlphaGo" system beat the world champion of Go, a Chinese board game that machines have been trying to master for decades.
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However, who actually works at Google DeepMind beyond the three cofounders is a bit of a mystery, possibly because Google doesn't want to risk shouting about them and losing its smartest staff to rivals that are also focusing on artificial intelligence, such as Facebook.
DeepMind's talented workforce is likely to have been one of the main reasons that Google decided to spend £400 million on the company last January, so we thought it was about time someone took a look at who actually works there.
DeepMind, founded in 2010, is heavily involved in a lot of research and a number of its academically-focused staff have been busy publishing papers on artificial intelligence since the company was incorporated. A page on the DeepMind website details all of these academics papers and which DeepMind employees contributed to them.
In order to identify the most impressive DeepMind scientists, Business Insider analysed the page to see which DeepMind staff have contributed to the most scientific papers. Google was unable to confirm whether all of the authors worked for DeepMind so we have linked to a source where possible. We also contacted several of the scientists directly.
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This article was originally published in December 2015. It was updated with new information and more employees in March 2016. All the additional people that have been added have at least four academic papers to their name.
Publications: 3
Official job title: Research Scientist
Confirmation: Personal website
Background: Charles Blundell holds a PhD in machine learning from University College London (UCL) and a masters in engineering in computer systems and software engineering from York University.
Publications: 3
Official job title: Research Scientist
Confirmation: Blog
Background: Prior to joining DeepMind just nine months ago, Martin Riedmiller worked on robotics and autonomous learning systems at the University of Freiberg in Germany.
Publications: 3
Official job title: Cofounder and Senior Staff Research Scientist
Confirmation: LinkedIn
Background: Shane Legg used to be DeepMind's Chief Science Officer but when Google bought the company he became a research scientist.
Publications: 3
Official job title: Head of Applied AI
Confirmation: LinkedIn
Background: Mustafa Suleyman dropped out of Oxford University at the age of 19 to set up a counselling service known as the Muslim Youth Helpline. He also worked as a policy officer for the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.
Publications: 4
Official job title: Software Engineer
Confirmation: Google Europe blog
Background: Karen Simonyan is one of the founders of Vision Factory, which was acquired by Google DeepMind in October 2014. At Vision Factory, his aim was to improve visual recognition systems using deep learning.
Publications: 4
Official job title: Research Scientist
Confirmation: Academic website
Background: Nal Kalchbrenner interned at Google in Mountain View in 2014 for five months before completing a PhD in computer science at the University of Cambridge.
Publications: 4
Official job title: Senior Research Scientist
Confirmation: Online CV
Background: Timothy Lillicrap is interested in the mathematical theories of machine learning and optimal control. He says he is particularly fascinated by the application of these formal frameworks to the study of the central nervous system (CNS).
Publications: 4
Official job title: Research Scientist
Confirmation: LinkedIn
Background: Danilo Rezende has a certificate from online learning institution Udacity for his work on "Artificial Intelligence for Robotics: Programming A Robotic Car".
Publications: 4
Official job title: Research Scientist
Confirmation: Personal website
Background: Arthur Guez was a PhD student in the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London. He was supervised by one of the lead programmers on Google's AlphaGo AI (David Silver) and has interned at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.
Publications: 4
Official job title: Research Scientist
Confirmation: Personal website
Background: Shakir completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge with Zoubin Ghahramani, head of the Machine Learning department at the university.
Publications: 5
Official job title: Unknown
Confirmation: Research Paper
Background: Ivo Danihelka is from the Czech Republic. He sometimes posts about computer science on code repository site GitHub. On his Quora profile, he describes himself as a "programmer interested in machine learning."
Publications: 5
Official job title: Unknown
Confirmation: Oxford University website
Background: Nicholas Heess was a PhD student at the Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation, University of Edinburgh. On his academic page, Heess states he is interested in understanding information processing in the brain.
Publications: 6
Official job title: VP of Engineering
Confirmation: LinkedIn
Background: Demis Hassabis is a child prodigy in chess, reaching master standard at the age of 13 with an Elo rating of 2300 (at the time the second highest rated player in the world Under-14 after Judit Polgár who had a rating of 2335, and is four days older than Hassabis). He's also highly skilled in many other games, including poker.
Publications: 6
Official job title: Research Scientist
Confirmation: Personal website
Background: On his website, Marc Bellemare writes that he focuses on "reinforcement learning" and in particular "representation learning, value function approximation, model learning, exploration, and all those other concepts that we feel are necessary to the development of generally competent agents."
Publications: 6
Official job title: Software Engineer
Confirmation: LinkedIn
Background: Ioannis Antonoglou joined DeepMind in 2012 after graduating from the University of Edinburgh with a masters degree in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Publications: 6
Official job title: Research Scientist
Confirmation: Personal website
Background: Joel Veness writes on his website that he is "interested in the algorithmic and computational aspects of Artificial Intelligence, with a particular emphasis on scalable and efficient approaches for online Reinforcement Learning agents."
Publications: 8
Official job title: Research Scientist
Confirmation: Research paper
Background: Daan Wierstra writes on his personal website that his interests include "spiking neuron models, genetic algorithms and the theoretical properties of evolution strategies, policy gradient based learning methods, and, ultimately, proper, well-founded research into artificial general intelligence."
Publications: 9
Official job title: Research Scientist
Confirmation: CrunchBase
Background: Alex Graves has also worked with Google AI guru Geoff Hinton on neural networks.
Publications: 11
Official job title: Research Scientist
Confirmation: Academic website
Background: Vlad Mnih completed a PhD in machine learning at the University of Toronto working under the supervision of Google AI guru Geoffrey Hinton.
Publications: 14
Official job title: Research Scientist
Confirmation: LinkedIn
Background: Koray Kavukcuoglu interned for Google in New York in the summer of 2010 for three months. He also holds a PhD from New York University where he worked on "unsupervised learning of feature extractors and multi-stage architectures for object recognition."
Publications: 16
Official job title: Research scientist
Confirmation: Academic website
Profile: David Silver holds a BA Hounors degree in Computing Science and an MA in Computing Science from the University of Cambridge. He also holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Alberta.
He is a Royal Society University Research Fellow that now carries out research at University College London alongside his duties at Google DeepMind.
He has contributed to many research efforts, with 29 publications listed on his personal website. Here is a full list of all the applications he’s built.
He is, in many ways, Google DeepMind's unsung hero.
On February 28, Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, joined 31 other media groups and filed a $2.3 billion suit against Google in Dutch court, alleging losses suffered due to the company's advertising practices.
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