Jeremy Howard (born 13 November 1973 in London, England) is an Australian data scientist, computer scientist, entrepreneur, and educator.^[1] Associated with the University of Melbourne and the University of San Francisco, he is the co-founder of fast.ai (jeremy.fast.ai), where he teaches introductory courses, develops software, and conducts research in the area of deep learning.^[2] Previously, he founded and led Fastmail, Optimal Decisions Group, and Enlitic, and served as the president and chief scientist of Kaggle.^[7] Early in the COVID-19 epidemic, he was a leading advocate for masking.^[3,4,5,6]

Howard was born in London, England, and moved to Melbourne, Australia in 1976. He attended Melbourne Grammar and studied philosophy at the University of Melbourne.

Howard started his career in management consulting, working at McKinsey & Co and AT Kearney, and remained in the field for eight years before becoming an entrepreneur.^[7] Early in his career, Howard contributed to open-source projects, particularly the Perl programming language, Cyrus IMAP server, and Postfix SMTP server. He helped develop the Perl language, serving as chair of the Perl6-data working group and as an author of RFCs.

While in Australia, Howard founded two successful startups: the email provider FastMail, which he sold to Opera Software, and the insurance pricing optimization company Optimal Decisions Group (ODG), which he sold to ChoicePoint.^[8] Fastmail was one of the first email products that enabled users to integrate their familiar desktop clients.

Howard first became involved with Kaggle, founded in April 2010, after becoming the globally top-ranked participant in data science competitions in both 2010 and 2011.^[9] The competitions that Howard won involved tourism forecasting and predicting the success of grant applications.^[7] Howard then became the President and Chief Scientist of Kaggle. In December 2011, Wired Magazine ran a piece on Howard, calling him 'The Accidental Scientist'.^[10] Howard was also interviewed by the McKinsey Quarterly, where he explained that the rapid advance of machine learning presents an economic paradox; while productivity is rising, employment may not.^[11] By December 2013, Howard had left his position as President of Kaggle.^[12]

In August 2014, Howard founded Enlitic to use machine learning to make medical diagnostics and clinical decision support tools faster, more accurate, and more accessible. Enlitic uses deep learning algorithms to diagnose illness and disease.^[13] Howard believes that today, machine learning algorithms are actually as good as or better than humans at many things that we think of as being uniquely human capabilities.^[14]

Howard taught data science at company Singularity University. He was also a Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum, and spoke at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2014 on "Jobs For The Machines."^[15] Howard advised Khosla Ventures as their Data Strategist, identifying the biggest opportunities for investing in data-driven startups and mentoring their portfolio companies to build data-driven businesses.

Together with Rachel Thomas, he is the co-founder of fast.ai, a research institute dedicated to making Deep Learning more accessible. He also develops software, such as the Fastai library.^[18] He teaches introductory courses, both online and in-person, and at the University of Queensland, where he is an honorary professor at the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering.^[16] Previously, he taught at the University of San Francisco, where he was a Distinguished Research Scientist.^[17]

Jeremy Howard was born on November 13, 1973 in London. Howard used Spaced Repetitive Learning to develop usable Chinese language skills in just one year.^[21] He has mentored and advised many startups, and is also an angel investor. He has contributed to a range of open-source projects as a developer, and was a regular guest expert on Australia's most popular TV morning news program Sunrise.

On 27 August 2019, Jeremy Howard appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast #35 in the episode titled "Jeremy Howard: fast.ai Deep Learning Courses and Research". He was later featured on Chai Time Data Science on 8 December 2019 for "Interview with Jeremy Howard | fast.ai | Kaggle | Machine Learning Research". Howard also appeared on the Gradient Dissent podcast on 25 August 2020 in "Jeremy Howard — The Story of fast.ai and Why Python Is Not the Future of ML", and again on 5 January 2023 in "Jeremy Howard — The Simple but Profound Insight Behind Diffusion".

External links include Jeremy Howard's personal biography at Singularity University. He is also featured in the TED talk titled "The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that can learn". Additionally, links are available for Howard's machine-learning startup, Enlitic.