Biography:Daphne Koller

From HandWiki
Short description: Israeli-American computer scientist
Daphne Koller
Daphne Koller 2019.jpg
Koller in 2019
Born (1968-08-27) August 27, 1968 (age 55)
EducationHebrew University of Jerusalem (BSc, MSc)
Stanford University (PhD)
Known forMachine learning
Graphical models
MOOCs
Coursera
AwardsISCB Fellow (2017)
IJCAI Computers and Thought Award (2001)
MacArthur Fellow (2004)
PECASE (1999)
ACM Prize in Computing (2007)
Scientific career
FieldsMachine learning
Computational biology
Computer vision
Artificial intelligence[1]
InstitutionsStanford University
University of California, Berkeley
ThesisFrom Knowledge to Belief (1994)
Doctoral advisorJoseph Halpern
Doctoral students
Websiteai.stanford.edu/~koller/

Daphne Koller (Hebrew: דפנה קולר‎; born August 27, 1968) is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She was a professor in the department of computer science at Stanford University[4] and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient.[1] She is one of the founders of Coursera, an online education platform. Her general research area is artificial intelligence[5][6] and its applications in the biomedical sciences.[7] Koller was featured in a 2004 article by MIT Technology Review titled "10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World"[8] concerning the topic of Bayesian machine learning.[9][10]

Education

Koller received a bachelor's degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1985, at the age of 17, and a master's degree from the same institution in 1986, at the age of 18.[11] She completed her PhD at Stanford in 1993 under the supervision of Joseph Halpern.[2]

Career and research

After her PhD, Koller did postdoctoral research at University of California, Berkeley from 1993 to 1995 under Stuart J. Russell,[12] and joined the faculty of the Stanford University computer science department in 1995. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2004. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 for contributions to representation, inference, and learning in probabilistic models with applications to robotics, vision, and biology. She was also elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014 and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2023.[13]

In April 2008, Koller was awarded the first ever $150,000 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences.[14]

She and Andrew Ng, a fellow Stanford computer science professor in the AI lab, founded Coursera in 2012. She served as the co-CEO with Ng, and then as president of Coursera. She was recognized for her contributions to online education by being named one of Newsweek's 10 Most Important People in 2010, Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2012, and Fast Company's Most Creative People in 2014.[15]

She left Coursera in 2016 to become chief computing officer at Calico.[15] In 2018, she left Calico to start and lead Insitro, a drug discovery startup.[16] The company operates an automated lab equipment running on algorithms that use its own in vitro disease models.[17] The process allows the combination of machine learning and genomics to predict as well as test treatments for diseases.[17]

Koller is primarily interested in representation, inference, learning, and decision making, with a focus on applications to computer vision and computational biology.[18] Along with Suchi Saria and Anna Penn of Stanford University, Koller developed PhysiScore, which uses various data elements to predict whether premature babies are likely to have health issues.[19]

Koller’s work on artificial intelligence builds on an 18th-century theorem about probability based on the Bayes rule named after the mathematician Thomas Bayes.[20] The approach underpins the process of transforming a current assumption about an event into a more accurate assumption based on more evidence.[20] Koller is a leading figure in research that expanded the existing Bayesian-related software so that it is capable of discerning patterns in vast collections of data.[20] In 2009, she published a textbook on probabilistic graphical models together with Nir Friedman.[21] She offered a free online course on the subject starting in February 2012.[22]

In 2020, Koller co-founded the startup Engageli, which developed an alternative to the Zoom app. Its online learning platform addressed problems such as low student engagement, featuring what the company called as “superior” learning experience that includes real-time evaluations to determine whether students are keeping up.[23]

Her former doctoral students include Lise Getoor,[2] Mehran Sahami,[2] Suchi Saria,[3] Eran Segal,[2] and Ben Taskar.[2]

Koller was interviewed by BBC Radio 4 on The Life Scientific broadcast on 27 September 2022.[24]

Honors and awards

Her honors and awards include:

  • 1994: Arthur Samuel Thesis Award[25]
  • 1996: Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship[25]
  • 1998: Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award
  • 1999: Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)
  • 2001: IJCAI Computers and Thought Award
  • 2003: Cox Medal at Stanford
  • 2004: MacArthur Fellow
  • 2004: Oswald G. Villard Fellow for Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford University[26]
  • 2007: ACM Prize in Computing
  • 2008: ACM/Infosys Award[citation needed]
  • 2010: Newsweek's 10 Most Important People
  • 2010: Huffington Post 100 Game Changers
  • 2011: Elected to National Academy of Engineering
  • 2013: Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People[27]
  • 2014: Elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  • 2014: Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business[28]
  • 2017: Elected ISCB Fellow by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB)[29]
  • 2019: ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award for contributions with significant breadth across computing, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines [30]
  • 2022: Technical Leadership Abie Award Winner[31]
  • 2023: Elected to National Academy of Sciences.[32]

Books

Koller's book authorships include:

  • Koller contributed one chapter to the 2018 book Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it by the American futurist Martin Ford.[33]
  • Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques by Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman.[34]

Personal life

Koller is married to Dan Avida, a venture capitalist at Opus Capital.[11]

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 {{Google Scholar id}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 Daphne Koller at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. 3.0 3.1 Saria, Suchi (2011). The digital patient : machine learning techniques for analyzing electronic health record data. stanford.edu (PhD thesis). Stanford University. OCLC 748681635. Free to read
  4. "Daphne Koller". https://ai.stanford.edu/~koller/. 
  5. New York Times Profile of Daphne Koller "Pursuing the Next Level of Artificial Intelligence"
  6. {{DBLP}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.
  7. Segal, E.; Shapira, M.; Regev, A.; Pe'er, D.; Botstein, D.; Koller, D.; Friedman, N. (2003). "Module networks: Identifying regulatory modules and their condition-specific regulators from gene expression data". Nature Genetics 34 (2): 166–176. doi:10.1038/ng1165. PMID 12740579.  closed access
  8. "10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World", MIT Technology Review, February 2004
  9. 2009. Graphical models (with Nir Friedman). MIT Press. ISBN:978-0262013192
  10. {{TED speaker}} template missing ID and not present in Wikidata.
  11. 11.0 11.1 "Profile details: Daphne Koller". Marquis Who's Who. http://search.marquiswhoswho.com/profile/100031126114.  (Subscription content?)
  12. "Daphne Koller, Stanford University". 23 November 2013. http://phdtree.org/scholar/koller-daphne/. 
  13. "2023 NAS Election". http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/2023-nas-election.html. 
  14. "Daphne Koller". http://awards.acm.org/award_winners/koller_5086016.cfm. 
  15. 15.0 15.1 "Daphne Koller Bids Farewell to Coursera, Hello to Calico - EdSurge News". 18 August 2016. https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-08-18-daphne-koller-bids-farewell-to-coursera-hello-to-calico. 
  16. "AI Researcher Daphne Koller Heading New Machine Learning Drug Discovery Venture". 2 May 2018. http://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/ai-researcher-daphne-koller-heading-new-machine-learning-drug-discovery-venture. 
  17. 17.0 17.1 D'Onfro, Jillian. "Coursera Cofounder Daphne Koller Melds AI And Biology In Drug Startup Insitro" (in en). https://www.forbes.com/sites/jilliandonfro/2019/09/17/insitro-drug-discovery-ai-daphne-koller-interview/. 
  18. "10 Machine Learning Experts You Need to Know - Dataconomy" (in en-US). 2014-09-16. http://dataconomy.com/2014/09/10-machine-learning-experts-you-need-to-know/. 
  19. "Artificial Intelligence – A Brave New World for Pharma | eyeforpharma" (in en-GB). http://social.eyeforpharma.com/clinical/artificial-intelligence-brave-new-world-pharma. 
  20. 20.0 20.1 20.2 Markoff, John (2008-05-03). "Pursuing the Next Level of Artificial Intelligence" (in en-US). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/03/technology/03koller.html. 
  21. Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman (2009). Probabilistic Graphical Models. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01319-2. 
  22. "Probabilistic Graphical Models 1: Representation - Coursera". http://pgm-class.org/. 
  23. Susan, Adams (October 14, 2020). "Coursera Founder Launches Zoom Challenger for Higher Ed". https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2020/10/14/coursera. 
  24. "Can computers discover new medicines?". https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001cdsm. 
  25. 25.0 25.1 "CURRICULUM VITAE FOR DAPHNE KOLLER". https://ai.stanford.edu/~koller/papers/cv.html. 
  26. "Hennessy announces eight new Bass University Fellows" (in en). Stanford University. https://news.stanford.edu/news/2004/november17/bass-1117.html. 
  27. Emanuel, Ezekiel (18 April 2013). "Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People". Time. http://time100.time.com/2013/04/18/time-100/slide/andrew-ng-and-daphne-koller/. 
  28. "Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business". https://www.fastcompany.com/person/daphne-koller. 
  29. "February 13, 2017: The International Society for Computational Biology Names Seven Members as the ISCB Fellows Class of 2017". https://www.iscb.org/iscb-news-items/3067-2017-feb13-iscb-fellows-class-2017. 
  30. "The ACM AAAI Allen Newell,computer science and other disciplines". https://awards.acm.org/newell#:~:text=The%20ACM%2FAAAI%20Allen%20Newell,computer%20science%20and%20other%20disciplines. 
  31. "Daphne Koller, PhD" (in en-US). https://ghc.anitab.org/speaker/daphne-koller-phd/. 
  32. "2023 NAS Election". http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/2023-nas-election.html. 
  33. Falcon, William (November 30, 2018). "This Is The Future Of AI According To 23 World-Leading AI Experts". https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamfalcon/2018/11/30/this-is-the-future-of-ai-according-to-23-world-leading-ai-experts/#60939b2b62f2. 
  34. Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman (2009). Probabilistic Graphical Models. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01319-2.