Andrew Ng

In 2019, Ng launched a new course "AI for Everyone." This is a non-technical course designed to help people understand AI's impact on society and its benefits and costs for companies, as well as how they can navigate through this technological revolution.

In January 2018, Ng unveiled the AI Fund, raising $175 million to invest in new startups.

He also wrote a book "Machine Learning Yearning", a practical guide for those interested in machine learning, which he distributed for free. In December 2018, he wrote a sequel called "AI Transformation Playbook".

Ng contributed one chapter to Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it (2018) by the American futurist Martin Ford.

In 2017, Ng said he supported basic income to allow the unemployed to study AI so that they can re-enter the workforce. He has stated that he enjoyed Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's "The Second Machine Age" which discusses issues such as AI displacement of jobs.

He currently lives in Los Altos Hills, California. In 2014, he married Carol E. Reiley and in February 2019 they had their first child, Nova. The MIT Tech Review named Ng and Reiley an "AI power couple."

In 2014, he joined Baidu as Chief Scientist, and carried out research related to big data and A.I. There he set up several research teams for things like facial recognition and Melody, an AI chatbot for healthcare (like Siri or Amazon's Alexa). In March 2017, he announced his resignation from Baidu.

Ng is an adjunct professor at Stanford University (formerly associate professor and Director of its AI Lab). Also a pioneer in online education, Ng co-founded Coursera and deeplearning.ai. With his online courses, he has successfully spearheaded many efforts to "democratize deep learning" teaching over 2.5 million students through his online courses. He is one of the world's most famous and influential computer scientists being named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2012, and Fast Company's Most Creative People in 2014. Since 2018 he launched and currently heads AI Fund, initially a $175-million investment fund for backing artificial intelligence startups. He has founded Landing AI, which provides AI-powered SaaS products and Transformation Program to empower enterprises into cutting-edge AI companies.

In 2012, along with Stanford computer scientist Daphne Koller he co-founded and was CEO of Coursera, a website that offers free online courses to everyone. It took off with over 100,000 students registered for Ng's popular CS229A course. Today, several million people have enrolled in Coursera courses, making the site one of the leading MOOC's in the world.

The seeds of Massive open online courses (MOOCs) go back a few years before the founding of Coursera in 2012. Two themes emphasized in the founding of modern MOOCs were scale and availability.

His work subsequently led to his founding of Coursera with Koller in 2012. As of 2019, the two most popular courses on the platform were taught and designed by Ng: "Machine Learning" (#1) and "Neural Networks and Deep Learning" (#2).

From 2011 to 2012, he worked at Google, where he founded and directed the Google Brain Deep Learning Project with Jeff Dean, Greg Corrado, and Rajat Monga.

In 2011, Ng founded the Google Brain project at Google, which developed large scale artificial neural networks using Google's distributed computer infrastructure. Among its notable results was a neural network trained using deep learning algorithms on 16,000 CPU cores, which learned to recognize cats after watching only YouTube videos, and without ever having been told what a "cat" is. The project's technology is also currently used in the Android Operating System's speech recognition system.

In 2011, Stanford launched a total of three Massive open online courses (MOOCs) on machine learning (CS229a), databases, and AI, taught by Ng, Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thrun, and Jennifer Widom. This has led to the modern MOOC movement. Ng taught machine learning and Widom taught databases. The course on AI taught by Thrun led to the genesis of Udacity. Coursera was the 6th online education website that Ng built and arguably the most successful to date.

But we learned and learned and learned from the early prototypes, until in 2011 we managed to build something that really took off.

In October 2011, the "applied" version of the Stanford class (CS229a) was hosted on ml-class.org and launched, with over 100,000 students registered for its first edition. The course featured quizzes and graded programming assignments and became one of the first and most successful Massive open online courses (MOOCs) created by a Stanford professor.

In 2011, I was working with four Stanford students. We were under tremendous pressure to build new features for the 100,000+ students that were already signed up. One of the students (Frank Chen) claims another one (Jiquan Ngiam) frequently stranded him in the Stanford building and refused to give him a ride back to his dorm until very late at night, so that he no choice but to stick around and keep working. I neither confirm nor deny this story.

Widom, Ng, and others were ardent advocates of Khan-styled tablet recordings, and between 2009–2011, several hundred hours of lecture videos recorded by Stanford instructors were recorded and uploaded. Ng tested some of the original designs with a local high school to figure the best practices for recording lessons.

In 2008 his group at Stanford was one of the first in the US to start advocating the use of GPUs in deep learning. The rationale was that an efficient computation infrastructure could speed up statistical model training by orders of magnitude, ameliorating some of the scaling issues associated with big data. At the time it was a controversial and risky decision, but since then and following Ng's lead, GPUs have become a cornerstone in the field. Since 2017 Ng has been advocating the shift to High Performance Computing (HPC) for scaling up deep learning and accelerating progress in the field.

Ng started the Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) program, which in 2008 published a number of Stanford courses online for free. Ng taught one of these courses, "Machine Learning", which includes his video lectures, along with the student materials used in the Stanford CS229 class. It offered a similar experience to MIT's Open Courseware except it aimed at providing a more "complete course" experience, equipped with lectures, course materials, problems and solutions, etc. The SEE videos were viewed by the millions and inspired Ng develop and iterate new versions of online tech.

In 2002, he received his PhD from UC Berkeley under the supervision of Michael I. Jordan. His thesis is titled "Shaping and policy search in reinforcement learning" and is well cited to this day.

He started working as a professor at Stanford University in 2002.

Since joining Stanford in 2002, he has advised dozens of Ph.D and M.Sc students, including Adam Coates, Pieter Abbeel, Ian Goodfellow, Ashutosh Saxena, Honglak Lee, Ilya Sutskever, Morgan Quigley, Richard Socher, Zico Kolter, Quoc Le, Siddharth Batra and many other students.

In 1998 Ng earned his master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At MIT he built the first publicly available, automatically-indexed web-search engine for research papers on the web (it was a precursor to CiteSeer/ResearchIndex, but specialized in machine learning).

In 1997, he earned his undergraduate degree with a triple major in computer science, statistics, and economics at the top of his class from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Between 1996–1998 he also conducted research on reinforcement learning, model selection, and feature selection at the AT&T Bell Labs.

Ng was born in London, UK in 1976. His parents are both immigrants from Hong Kong. Growing up, he spent time in Hong Kong and Singapore and later graduated from Raffles Institution in Singapore in 1992.