Nando de Freitas
Vice President of AI at Microsoft AI
A Zimbabwe-born machine learning researcher who led generative audio and image work at DeepMind and is now a vice president of AI at Microsoft.
Biography
Nando de Freitas is a researcher in machine learning, especially neural networks, Bayesian inference and Bayesian optimization, and deep learning. Born in Zimbabwe, he studied at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, completing an undergraduate degree (1991 to 1994) and an MSc (1994 to 1996), and earned his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge in 2000.
He was a professor at the University of British Columbia from 2001 and at the University of Oxford from 2013 to 2017. In 2014 he joined Google's DeepMind when it acquired the Oxford spinoff Dark Blue Labs, and he led the team that created tools for generating audio and images. In September 2024 he joined Microsoft AI as a vice president of AI. His honors include best paper awards at ICML and ICLR in 2016.
Notable contributions
Led generative audio and image work at DeepMind
After joining DeepMind in 2014 through the Dark Blue Labs acquisition, led the team creating tools for generating audio and images.
Won best paper at ICML and ICLR 2016
Received the Best Paper Award at both the International Conference on Machine Learning and the International Conference on Learning Representations in 2016.
Joined Microsoft AI as a vice president
Joined Microsoft AI as VP of AI in September 2024.
Career history
Led the team building audio and image generation tools
