Andrew Ng
Born 1976 · Age 49
British-American computer scientist, AI researcher, educator and entrepreneur; cofounder of Google Brain and Coursera; founder of DeepLearning.AI, Landing AI and AI Fund; adjunct professor at Stanford.
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Life & Career Timeline
Born in London, United Kingdom
Andrew Yan-Tak Ng born to Ronald P. Ng and Tisa Ho in London.
Started learning programming
Began learning the basics of programming at age six through books.
Family moved to Singapore
Ng and his family relocated from Hong Kong to Singapore.
Graduated Raffles Institution (high school)
Completed secondary education at Raffles Institution in Singapore (estimated year based on undergraduate start).
Won Silver Medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad
Achieved a Silver Medal at the IMO during his high school years (exact IMO year not specified in source; estimated).
Microsoft Technical Scholarship (first award)
Received Microsoft Technical Scholarship (1995).
Bell Atlantic Network Services Scholarship
Awarded Bell Atlantic Network Services Scholarship while an undergraduate.
Research at AT&T Bell Labs (start)
Began conducting research on reinforcement learning, model selection, and feature selection at AT&T Bell Labs (research period spans 1996–1998).
Microsoft Technical Scholarship (second award)
Received Microsoft Technical Scholarship (1996).
Andrew Carnegie Society Scholarship
Received Andrew Carnegie Society Scholarship while an undergraduate.
Earned BS (Carnegie Mellon) - triple major
Received undergraduate degree with a triple major in Computer Science, Statistics, and Economics from Carnegie Mellon University.
Berkeley Fellowship (start)
Awarded a Berkeley Fellowship during graduate study (period 1998–2000).
Completed MS at MIT; built searchable research-paper index
Earned MS in EECS from MIT and built an early publicly accessible automatically indexed search engine for research papers (precursor to CiteSeerX specialized for ML).
Microsoft Research Fellowship
Received a Microsoft Research Fellowship (listed 2001–2002).
Ph.D. in Computer Science (UC Berkeley)
Completed Ph.D. under Michael I. Jordan. Thesis: 'Shaping and policy search in reinforcement learning.'
Joined Stanford as Assistant Professor
Started as an assistant professor at Stanford University, Computer Science and EE departments; later became Director of SAIL.
Coauthored influential LDA paper
Coauthored paper (with David Blei and Michael Jordan) that introduced Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) in JMLR (2003).
Stanford Autonomous Helicopter project major results
Led/participated in autonomous helicopter research producing one of the most capable autonomous helicopters (project active mid-2000s).
Key STAIR / ROS contributions as PI
Principal investigator on Stanford STAIR project which contributed to Robot Operating System (ROS) development and robotics research.
Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship
Received the Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship.
Named MIT Technology Review TR35 Innovator
Included in MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35 (TR35, 2008).
Advocated GPU use in deep learning research
One of the early groups in the US to push GPU adoption for deep learning training (in Stanford group).
Promoted to Associate Professor, Stanford
Became an associate professor at Stanford University (listed promotion year 2009).
IJCAI Computers and Thought Award
Received the IJCAI 'Computers and Thought' Award (prestigious award for researchers under 35).
Stanford launched three MOOCs including Ng's ML course
Stanford released MOOCs in Machine Learning (Ng), databases, and AI, accelerating the modern MOOC movement.
Founded Google Brain (Google Deep Learning project)
Co-founded and led the Google Brain project with Jeff Dean, Greg Corrado, and Rajat Monga while working at Google (2011–2012).
Launched ML online class (ml-class.org) — 100k+ students
Hosted applied version of Stanford ML class online (ml-class.org) and enrolled over 100,000 students in first edition; early seed of Coursera.
Co-founded Coursera with Daphne Koller
Cofounded Coursera, a massive open online course platform; Ng served as cofounder and CEO early on and later as Chairman & Co-Founder.
Google Brain 'cat' unsupervised learning result publicized
Google Brain team trained large-scale neural networks (reported 2012) that learned to recognize cats; used ~16,000 CPU cores in research experiments.
Fortune 40 Under 40 & CNN 10: Thinkers
Included in Fortune's 40 under 40 and featured in CNN 10 'Thinkers'.
Named to Time 100 Most Influential People
Recognized in Time magazine's '100 Most Influential People'.
Joined Baidu as Chief Scientist
Hired by Baidu to lead and build its Artificial Intelligence Group (became Chief Scientist and head of AI).
Married Carol E. Reiley
Married roboticist and entrepreneur Carol E. Reiley (m. 2014).
Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business
Named among Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business (2014 recognition).
World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders
Selected as one of the World Economic Forum's Young Global Leaders (2015).
Board chair role at Woebot Labs (approx.)
Served as chair of the board for Woebot Labs, a mental-health chatbot company (year not precisely specified in source; estimated).
Board member at drive.ai (approx.)
Served on the board of drive.ai (exact appointment year not specified; drove.ai later acquired by Apple in 2019).
Published 'Machine Learning Yearning' (free distribution)
Authored and distributed 'Machine Learning Yearning', a practical guide for machine learning practitioners (distributed freely).
Founded Landing AI
Launched Landing AI to provide AI-powered SaaS products focused on industrial automation and manufacturing.
Resigned as Baidu Chief Scientist
Announced resignation from Baidu after leading its AI Group; left to pursue new projects in AI education and startups.
Launched DeepLearning.AI
Announced DeepLearning.AI, an education company offering deep learning courses and specializations on Coursera.
Unveiled AI Fund — $175M to back AI startups
Launched AI Fund, an investment fund backed by $175 million to accelerate AI startups and founders.
Published 'AI Transformation Playbook'
Released 'AI Transformation Playbook' (Dec 2018) guiding companies on adopting AI.
Launched 'AI for Everyone' course
Published a non-technical course 'AI for Everyone' through deeplearning.ai/Coursera to broaden AI understanding across industries.
Drive.ai acquired by Apple
drive.ai, on whose board Ng served, was acquired by Apple (2019); Ng had been a board member (timing of board appointment not precisely specified).
First child (daughter) born
Birth of first daughter (announced Feb 20, 2019).
Coursera and DeepLearning.AI courses in top platform rankings
By 2020–2021 multiple Ng courses ranked among Coursera's most popular (Machine Learning #1, Neural Networks #2, AI for Everyone #5).
Birth of son
Second child (son) born in 2021 (announced Aug 25, 2021).
Landing AI Series A — $57M raised
Landing AI raised $57 million in a Series A round led by McRock Capital to scale computer-vision adoption in manufacturing.
Named to Time100 AI Most Influential People
Included in Time's 2023 'Time AI 100' list of most influential people in AI.
Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Statistical Society
Awarded an Honorary Fellowship by the Royal Statistical Society (2024).
Living and working from Los Altos Hills, California
Reported residence in Los Altos Hills and ongoing roles at Stanford (adjunct), Landing AI (Executive Chairman), DeepLearning.AI (Founder), AI Fund (General Partner), and Coursera (Chair & Co-founder).
Appointed to Amazon board of directors
Amazon announced the appointment of Andrew Ng to its board of directors (April 11, 2024).
AI Fund first India investment in Jivi
AI Fund (Ng-led) made its first investment in India backing AI healthcare startup Jivi (Oct 2024).
Research and publication footprint
Authored/co-authored 200+ (some sources 300+) publications in ML, robotics, vision and NLP (aggregate career milestone recorded across sources).
Key Achievement Ages
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