Mohamed, Shakir

Impact on the world

A senior researcher at DeepMind since 2013 whose work on generative models and variational inference has been cited tens of thousands of times, Mohamed co-founded the Deep Learning Indaba in 2017 after noticing how few African researchers were represented at major AI conferences; the annual gathering has since inspired researchers who went on to found African-language AI startups including Masakhane and Lelapa AI, and its model has been replicated by machine-learning communities in Eastern Europe and Latin America seeking similar representation. TIME named him to its 2023 “100 Most Influential People in AI” list, and he serves on the governing boards of the field's largest conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR) as well as the Royal Society's Diversity Committee, consistently pushing the argument that AI systems built without diverse global input risk causing real-world harm to the communities least represented in their design.

Life & background

Born around 1983 and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, Mohamed earned both his undergraduate and master's degrees in electrical and information engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, working briefly as a business analyst at Nedbank before pursuing doctoral study. He completed a PhD in statistical machine learning at the University of Cambridge, beginning in 2007 when, as he has recalled, few people even understood what “machine learning” meant, then held a Junior Research Fellowship at the University of British Columbia through the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research before joining DeepMind in 2013 as one of its early researchers, back when the company was still a small London startup. He is now a Research Director at Google DeepMind, an Honorary Professor at University College London, and an Associate Fellow at Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.

Sources

1. TIME (100 Most Influential People in AI); Royal Society; CIFAR; Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence