Textbook of AI

1976–, Computer scientist, AI educator

Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is a British-American computer scientist whose career has spanned research, education and entrepreneurship. As a Stanford professor (from 2002), his CS229 Machine Learning course shaped a generation of ML researchers and his 2008 lecture videos on YouTube were one of the first free, large-scale online machine-learning resources.

In 2011 he co-founded Coursera with Daphne Koller, helping launch the modern MOOC movement; his Coursera Machine Learning course has been taken by several million people. In 2011 he also founded Google Brain, the deep-learning research group within Google whose early demonstrations (the cat-detecting unsupervised network, 2012) helped legitimise deep learning at industrial scale. He led Baidu's AI research (2014–2017) and founded Landing AI and DeepLearning.AI.

Ng's research has covered reinforcement-learning robotics (including autonomous helicopter aerobatics), large-scale unsupervised learning, deep learning for medical imaging, and broader applications. He has been a vocal commentator on AI policy, generally a sceptic of fast-AGI scenarios and an advocate for narrow, application-focused AI deployment.