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Nando de Freitas

Appointment

Associate Fellow

Learning in Machines & Brains

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About

Nando de Freitas is a computer scientist who wants to understand intelligence and how brains work.

His key areas of research are neural networks and deep learning, reinforcement learning, apprenticeship learning and teaching, goal and program discovery, transfer and multi-task learning, reasoning and cognition.

He is a strong believer in building artificial intelligence (AI) tools to improve health care, advance science and provide decision support systems for lawyers, economists, politicians, environmentalists and others, with a goal of improving life on Earth. In his view, the price to be paid if we do not develop AI tools to extend our minds – and address our complex problems – is simply too high.

Awards

  • Charles A. McDowell Award for Excellence in Research, 2013
  • Distinguished Paper Award at IJCAI, 2013
  • MITACS Young Researcher Award, 2010

Relevant Publications

  • Wang, Z. et al. “Dueling network architectures for deep reinforcement learning.” In Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 1995–2003. 2016.

  • Wang, Z. et al. “Bayesian optimization in high dimensions via random embeddings.” In Proceedings of the 23rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI),  1778–1784. 2016.

  • Reed, S., and N. de Freitas. “Neural Programmer-Interpreters.” ICLR, 2015. arXiv:1511.06279.

Institution

University of Oxford

Department

Department of Computer Science

Education

  • PhD (Bayesian Methods for Neural Networks), Trinity College, Cambridge University
  • BSc (Engineering), University of Witwatersrand

Country

United Kingdom

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The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) is a globally influential research organization proudly based in Canada. We mobilize the world’s most brilliant people across disciplines and at all career stages to advance transformative knowledge and solve humanity’s biggest problems, together. We are supported by the governments of Canada, Alberta and Québec, as well as Canadian and international foundations, individuals, corporations and partner organizations.

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