Zoubin Ghahramani FRS is a British-Iranian artificial intelligence and machine learning researcher, computer scientist, and engineer, who serves as Vice President of Research at Google DeepMind and Professor of Information Engineering (also described as computer engineering) at the University of Cambridge.^[4,6,14,3,5] Ghahramani was born on 8 February 1970, with sources differing on his place of birth: English Wikipedia records that he was born in Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, while Spanish Wikipedia states that he was born in Iran.^{[4,6,2,3,14,5]} He has been a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge since 2009 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015, with his portrait from the Royal Society photographed that same year.^{[4,6,2,15,3,5]}

He studied at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completing his doctoral dissertation, "Computation and Psychophysics of Sensorimotor Integration", in 1995 under the supervision of Michael I. Jordan and Tomaso Poggio.^[6] His research focuses on machine learning, Bayesian statistics, graphical models, variational Bayes (variational Bayesian inference), and computational neuroscience, with his academic homepage and curriculum vitae hosted at Cambridge and Carnegie Mellon University.^[6]

He held appointments at University College London from 1998 to 2005 and has held joint appointments at UCL and the Alan Turing Institute, as well as a professorship at UCL.^[6,14,8,1,4] From 2003 to 2012, he was an Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Machine Learning Department within the School of Computer Science (also described in Persian Wikipedia as simultaneously holding a professorship there), and he has also been affiliated with the University of Toronto.^[12,14,8,1] Outside academia, Ghahramani served as the Chief Scientist of Uber from 2016 until 2020.^[10] In 2020, he joined Google Brain as Senior Research Director, became Vice President of Research in 2021, and headed Google Brain until its merger with DeepMind to form Google DeepMind.^[1,15] Additionally, he served as a founding Cambridge Liaison Director of the Alan Turing Institute, founding Deputy Director (and Deputy Director) of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, contributed to the Royal Society's Machine Learning Report in 2017, and led the UK's Future of Compute Review in 2023.^[6,15]

Zoubin Ghahramani was born on February 8, 1970 in Iran, and lived during his childhood in Iran and the former Soviet Union. He later moved with his family to Spain and was educated at the American School of Madrid in Spain for 10 years. He continued his education at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a double degree in Cognitive Science and Computer Science in 1990. In 1995, he obtained his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the help of a grant from the McDonnell-Pew Foundation. His thesis was titled "Computation and psychophysics of sensorimotor integration" and his doctoral supervisors were Michael I. Jordan and Tomaso Poggio.

He moved to the University of Toronto in 1995, where he was an ITRC postdoctoral fellow in the artificial intelligence laboratory of the Department of Computer Science, working with Geoffrey Hinton. From 1998 to 2005, he was a professor at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London.

Ghahramani was educated at the American School of Madrid in Spain and the University of Pennsylvania, where he was awarded a dual degree in Cognitive Science and Computer Science in 1990.^[6,7] Zoubin Ghahramani obtained his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Michael I. Jordan and Tomaso Poggio, with sources identifying his department as either the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences or the Department of Cognitive Science.^[6]

Following his Ph.D., Ghahramani moved to the University of Toronto in 1995 as a postdoctoral fellow in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, working with Geoffrey Hinton.^[1] From 1998 to 2005, he was a faculty member at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London. Ghahramani has made significant contributions to the fields of Bayesian machine learning (notably variational methods for approximate Bayesian inference), graphical models, and computational neuroscience.^[18] His current research focuses on nonparametric Bayesian modelling and statistical machine learning. He has also worked on artificial intelligence, information retrieval, bioinformatics, and statistics, which provide the mathematical foundations for handling uncertainty, making decisions, and designing learning systems.

Regarding his academic citations and publication count, English Wikipedia reports that he has published over 300 papers with more than 100,000 citations (an h-index of 132), French Wikipedia records over 200 publications with more than 80,000 citations (an h-index of 120), while Arabic and Spanish sources report more than 200 papers with over 30,000 citations (an h-index of 74).^[12,9,6,16] In 2014, he co-founded Geometric Intelligence with Gary Marcus, Doug Bemis, and Ken Stanley, which was acquired by Uber in 2016.^[12,10] Afterwards, he moved to Uber's artificial intelligence laboratories in 2016 and later became VP of AI and Chief Scientist at Uber, replacing Gary Marcus. In 2020, he joined Google; in 2021, he became VP of Research and head of Google Brain according to English Wikipedia (until its merger with DeepMind in April 2023), whereas Arabic, Spanish, and French sources state that he became Senior Director of Google Brain in April 2021 following the departure of Samy Bengio.^[11] He has also served as an advisor to Microsoft Research, VocalIQ (acquired by Apple), Cambridge Capital Management, Echobox, Opera Solutions, and several other companies.

Ghahramani was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)—formally the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge—in 2015.^[12,19] His certificate of election recognizes him as a world leader in machine learning who has significantly advanced state-of-the-art algorithms that can learn from data, highlighting his fundamental contributions to probabilistic modeling and Bayesian nonparametric approaches to machine learning systems, as well as the development of approximate variational inference algorithms for scalable learning.^[6,13,12] Regarding his pioneering research, the English text of the certificate states that he is a pioneer of semi-supervised learning methods, active learning algorithms, and sparse Gaussian processes, whereas the Spanish text states that he is a pioneer of semi-supervised learning methods, active convolutional neural network algorithms, and Gaussian processes.^[6,13,12] The certificate additionally notes that his development of novel infinite-dimensional nonparametric models, such as the infinite latent feature model, has been highly influential.^[6,13,12] In 2021, he was awarded the Royal Society Milner Award in recognition of 'his fundamental contributions to probabilistic machine learning'.^[6,13]