Daphne Koller (born August 27, 1968 in Jerusalem, Israel) is an Israeli-American computer scientist.^[92] While English Wikipedia states that she was a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University, Turkish Wikipedia describes her as currently being a professor there, a department she joined in 1995.^[16,3] She is a co-founder of the online education platform Coursera, established alongside Andrew Ng. Her general research area is artificial intelligence and its applications in the biomedical sciences, with expertise spanning machine learning, computational biology, and computer vision.^{[17,15,33,3,93]} Koller was featured in a 2004 MIT Technology Review article titled "10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World" regarding Bayesian machine learning.^[34,12,3,17]

She completed her bachelor's degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1985 at the age of 17 and earned her master's degree there in 1986. She completed her PhD at Stanford University under the supervision of Joseph Halpern, with her doctoral thesis titled "From Knowledge to Belief" completed in 1993 according to Turkish Wikipedia and dated 1994 in the sources' thesis records. In 2009, she co-authored a textbook on statistical graphical models together with Nir Friedman. Koller has also been affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, and has advised students including Lise Getoor, Carlos Guestrin, Su-In Lee, Mehran Sahami, Suchi Saria, Eran Segal, and Ben Taskar.^[2,3,10] Her honors include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 1999, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 2001, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004, the ACM Prize in Computing in 2007, and selection as an ISCB Fellow in 2017.^[16,3]

Koller was born on August 27, 1968, in Jerusalem, Israel.^[3] She received a bachelor's degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1985, at the age of 17, and a master's degree from the same institution in 1986, at the age of 18.^[19] She completed her PhD at Stanford in 1993 under the supervision of Joseph Halpern.^[35]

After her PhD, Koller did postdoctoral research at University of California, Berkeley from 1993 to 1995 under Stuart J. Russell, and joined the faculty of the Stanford University computer science department in 1995. Koller is primarily interested in representation, inference, learning, and decision making, with a focus on applications to computer vision and computational biology.^[37] Koller's work on artificial intelligence builds on Bayes' theorem, an 18th-century result about probability named after the mathematician Thomas Bayes, which underpins the process of transforming a current assumption about an event into a more accurate assumption based on more evidence.^[13] She is a leading figure in research that expanded existing Bayesian-related software so that it is capable of discerning patterns in vast collections of data. In 2009, she published a textbook on probabilistic graphical models together with Nir Friedman, and she offers a course on the subject.^[39,2] Along with Suchi Saria and Anna Penn of Stanford University, Koller developed PhysiScore, which uses various data elements to predict whether premature babies are likely to have health issues.^[38] Her former doctoral students include Lise Getoor, Mehran Sahami, Suchi Saria, Eran Segal, and Ben Taskar.^[2]

In 2012, she and Andrew Ng, a fellow Stanford computer science professor in the AI lab, founded Coursera, where she served as co-CEO with Ng and then as president. She left Coursera in 2016 to become chief computing officer at Calico. In 2018, she left Calico to start and lead Insitro, a drug discovery startup.^[36] The company operates automated lab equipment running on algorithms that use its own in vitro disease models, a process allowing the combination of machine learning and genomics to predict as well as test treatments for diseases.^[23] In 2020, Koller co-founded the startup Engageli, which developed an alternative to the Zoom app. Its online learning platform addressed problems such as low student engagement, featuring what the company called a "superior" learning experience that includes real-time evaluations to determine whether students are keeping up.^[24]

Koller was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2004. In April 2008, she was awarded the first ever $150,000 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences.^[5,20] She was recognized for her contributions to online education by being named one of Newsweek's 10 Most Important People in 2010, Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2012, and Fast Company's Most Creative People in 2014.^[22,26] She was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 for contributions to representation, inference, and learning in probabilistic models with applications to robotics, vision, and biology. She was also elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014 and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2023.^[21,14] Koller was interviewed by BBC Radio 4 on The Life Scientific broadcast on 27 September 2022.^[41]

In 1994, the Arthur Samuel Thesis Award was received, followed by a Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship in 1996. In 2004, the Oswald G. Villard Fellow for Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford University was awarded, followed by the ACM/Infosys Award in 2008.

Recognition in 2013 included Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People, followed by Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business in 2014. In 2017, election as an ISCB Fellow was conferred by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). In 2019, the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award was awarded for contributions with significant breadth across computing, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines.

Koller's book authorships include Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques, co-authored with Nir Friedman. Additionally, she contributed one chapter to the 2018 book Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it by the American futurist Martin Ford.