Adji Bousso Dieng (born in the 20th century in the Kaolack Region, Senegal) is a Senegalese computer scientist, statistician, and university professor working in the field of artificial intelligence. Her research bridges probabilistic graphical models (deep probabilistic graphical modeling) and deep learning to discover meaningful structures from unlabelled data and define generative models. She completed studies at Lycée Henri-IV, Télécom ParisTech, Cornell University, and Columbia University, where she was advised by David Blei and John Paisley. Her honors and recognitions include the Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Learning, Rising Star in Machine Learning, the Columbia GSAS Outstanding Recent Alumni Award, the Columbia University Dean Fellowship, the Cornell Institute for African Development Fellowship, and the Savage Award.^[11]

She is an artificial intelligence research scientist at Google Brain (Google AI) in Mountain View, California, where she has worked since 2019.^[2] In 2021, Dieng joined the faculty at Princeton University, becoming the first Black female faculty member in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, as well as either the first Black female professor or the first Black faculty member ever in the Department of Computer Science.^[1,41,12] Dieng also founded and serves as president of the non-profit organization The Africa I Know (TAIK), which aims to inspire and encourage young Africans to pursue studies and careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and AI by highlighting African role models, informing the general public about developments made by Africans in STEM and AI, and educating society about Africa's rich history.^[2,7,5]

Adji Bousso Dieng attended a public school in Kaolack. After completing her school education, she was selected to represent Senegal at an excellence camp for girls' education in Burkina Faso, a program founded by the Malian astrophysicist and former Prime Minister Cheick Modibo Diarra. From there, she won a scholarship for engineering studies in France, going on to study in Paris and earning the Diplôme d'Ingénieur from Télécom ParisTech in 2013 as well as a master's degree in applied statistics from Cornell University in 2013. Subsequently, Dieng worked for the World Bank for one year. In May 2020, she received her doctorate in statistics from Columbia University under David M. Blei with the dissertation "Deep Probabilistic Graphical Modeling." This work aimed to transfer ideas from deep learning to probabilistic modeling to account for interpretability, uncertainty, and domain knowledge while ensuring flexibility in learning about complex systems. The International Society for Bayesian Analysis honored her doctoral dissertation with the Savage Award.^[4,5,6,7,8]

After her doctorate, Dieng founded the non-profit organization The Africa I Know, which provides a publishing platform, theafricaiknow.org, to showcase African expertise and contributions to knowledge and innovation. The organization's goal is to inspire young Africans to pursue studies and careers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and artificial intelligence.^[9] In September 2021, she became an assistant professor at Princeton University, where she is affiliated with the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, the Princeton Materials Institute, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI). In addition, she is a scientist at Google AI.

At Princeton, she directs the Vertaix lab, which conducts research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and the natural sciences. Her Vertaix lab has developed a tool called Vendi Score to evaluate the diversity of datasets and model outputs, which is crucial for the development of robust machine learning tools and for accelerating scientific discoveries.^[10] Dieng uses artificial intelligence to develop smart materials with nanopores that can selectively absorb and release small chemical compounds such as carbon dioxide or certain pharmaceuticals. The development of such structures would allow more precise control over the movement and release of small molecules than previously possible. In the case of carbon dioxide, materials with nanopores could enable the construction of large-scale CO₂ capture plants that filter and concentrate carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for industrial use. In the pharmaceutical sector, nanopores could be crucial for developing systems that release small doses of a drug over a prolonged period of time, thereby considerably simplifying the treatment of many diseases.^[9,3]

Dieng was born and raised in Kaolack, Senegal, in the early 1990s, coming from a modest family as one of 15 siblings.^[6,44,5] Her father never attended school, and her mother started but did not complete secondary education.^[13] To support the family, her parents ran a fabric business.^[6] Her father died when she was four years old, yet her mother continued to make education a priority for the family.^[35] Dieng attended public schools in Kaolack for her primary and secondary education.^[13,42] During high school, she distinguished herself through her academic achievements, winning a prize in the Senegalese Olympiad ("Concours Général") in philosophy, being selected to participate in the 2005 excellence camp organized by the Pathfinder Foundation for Education and Development (a non-profit founded by Cheick Modibo Diarra), and subsequently being selected to participate in a competitive exam organized for African girls in partnership between the Central Bank of West African States and the Pathfinder Foundation.^[13,44]

She received a scholarship to study abroad after winning this competition.^[13] While abroad, Dieng attended Lycée Henri IV, a public secondary school located in Paris. She then attended Télécom ParisTech, a French public institution of higher education and engineering research located in Palaiseau, France. Dieng spent the third year of Télécom ParisTech's curriculum at Cornell University, where she went in 2012. In 2013, she graduated from Télécom ParisTech, earning her Diplôme d'ingénieur from the French Grandes Écoles system, and was also awarded a Master's degree in Applied Statistics from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.^[14]

After working for one year at the World Bank in Washington, Adji Bousso Dieng began her PhD in statistics at Columbia University. She worked with David Blei and John Paisley to bridge probabilistic graphical modeling and deep learning, with the goal of discovering meaningful patterns from unlabeled data for applications in natural language processing, computer vision, and healthcare.^[6,14] In May 2020, she defended and obtained a thesis entitled "Deep Probabilistic Granphical Modeling". Dieng's doctoral work received various forms of recognition, including the Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Learning, the Savage Award for Applied Methodology (as the first Black woman to win this award since its establishment in 1977), and a Rising Star in Machine Learning nomination by the University of Maryland. Dieng was also the second Black woman to graduate from the Department of Statistics at Columbia University.

In 2013, Dieng accepted a position as a Junior Professional Associate at the World Bank, working on risk modeling in the Department of Market and Counterparty Risk.^[5] She left the World Bank the following summer, in 2014, after being awarded a Columbia University Dean Fellowship to begin a PhD in statistics.^[32] Prior to her work at Google, Dieng completed internships at major AI-focused companies such as Microsoft Research in Seattle and DeepMind (Google DeepMind) in London, and she also worked with Yann LeCun at Facebook AI Research. In 2019, Dieng joined Google Brain as a Research Scientist in Artificial Intelligence (AI).^[15] She continued to work at Google Brain in a part-time capacity while pursuing her doctoral studies, and remains there part-time.

In 2021, Dieng joined the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor.^[16] She is the first Black faculty member in Computer Science in Princeton's history, the first Black woman tenure-track faculty member in Princeton's School of Engineering, and the second Black woman tenure-track faculty member in Computer Science across the Ivy League.^[14] At Princeton University, Dieng founded and directs the Vertaix research lab, which focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence and the natural sciences.^[17,46] The models and algorithms developed are motivated by and aim to solve problems in those domains, contributing to advancing methodological research in AI. As part of her research activities in Vertaix, Dieng leverages tools in statistical machine learning and deep learning to develop methods for learning from multi-modal data arising from the natural sciences.^[17] As part of this research, Dieng is a co-principal investigator on a grant from the NSF.^[18]

Dieng is also an AI2050 Early Career Fellow from Schmidt Futures.^[20,19,18] As part of this fellowship, she draws inspiration from how ecologists measure biodiversity to design a method to score an AI model's diversity and quantify how biased the model is.^{[20,19,18,47]} Dieng has authored or co-authored several papers published in specialized AI venues, journals, and conferences such as NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems), ICML, ICLR (International Conference on Learning Representations), AISTATS, and TACL, and is cited as such.^[21,19]

Originally from Kaolack, Senegal, Dieng has lived on three continents but remains a vocal advocate for her home continent of Africa. A committed Pan-Africanist, she also denounces the grip of American digital industry giants on daily life on the African continent and on the political life of African states.^[45] She founded and chairs the non-profit organization The Africa I Know (TAIK) with the aim of encouraging young Africans to pursue careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and artificial intelligence (AI) by highlighting African role models, informing the general public about developments made by Africans in STEM and artificial intelligence, and raising the general public's awareness of African history.

In May 2022, at the yearly Conference of African Ministers in Dakar, she made the case for the urgency of STEM education in Africa and spoke about the infrastructure needed to enable that, talking about the need for "pragmatic unity" in additional contexts beyond just trade.^[23] She was also one of the five young Africans invited on a panel to discuss the role of younger people in the decade of action.^[24] Both invitations were from the United Nations' Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).

Dieng is the founder of the non-profit called "The Africa I Know" (TAIK), with the mission to positively change the narrative about Africa and provide opportunities to young Africans.^[25] Dieng noticed the inaccurate portrayal of Africa in the media, which was further accentuated during the COVID-19 global crisis.^[26,27] Another goal of the initiative is to provide role models to young Africans, who often grow up without seeing role models that look like them due to a lack of visibility.

Noting that the majority of people do not know about the rich history of STEM and AI developments made possible by Africans, TAIK inspires young Africans to follow careers in STEM and AI, informs people about contributions in STEM and AI by Africans, and educates about the rich history of Africa.^[25] Since its founding in 2020, TAIK has grown to a non-profit with 12 employees and thousands of followers across several social media platforms.^[14]

In 2006, she was named a Laureate du Concours General (Senegalese Olympiad, Philosophy) and received the Senegalese Government Excellence Scholarship. She was awarded the Pathfinder Foundation Scholarship in 2007, followed by the Cornell Institute for African Development Fellowship in 2013 and the Columbia University Dean Fellowship in 2014.

In 2016, she received the Microsoft Azure Research Award. She received a Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Learning and was recognized as a Rising Star in Machine Learning by the University of Maryland in 2019. In 2020, she was named one of the 100 Most Influential Young Africans and received the Savage Award, Applied Methodology, for her thesis "Deep Probabilistic Graphical Modeling". In 2022, she was named an AI2050 Early Career Fellow from Schmidt Futures and received the 2022 Annie T. Randall award. In 2023, she received Columbia University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences' Outstanding Recent Alumni Award.

Dieng's publications include "Topic Modeling in Embedding Spaces," co-authored with F. J. R. Ruiz and D. M. Blei, published in the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL) in 2020. In 2019, Dieng, Y. Kim, A. M. Rush, and D. M. Blei published "Avoiding Latent Variable Collapse With Generative Skip Models" in Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS). In 2018, Dieng co-authored "Noisin: Unbiased Regularization for Recurrent Neural Networks" alongside R. Ranganath, J. Altosaar, and D. M. Blei for the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). In 2017, publications included "TopicRNN: A Recurrent Neural Network with Long Range Semantic Dependency" with C. Wang, J. Gao, and J. W. Paisley at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), as well as "Variational Inference via χ Upper Bound Minimization" with D. Tran, R. Ranganath, J. W. Paisley, and D. M. Blei at Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS).