The 21 smartest AI scientists working at Google DeepMind

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21. Charles Blundell

21. Charles Blundell

Publications: 3

Official job title: Research Scientist

Confirmation: Personal website

Background: Charles Blundell holds a PhD in machine learning from University College London (UCL) and a masters in engineering in computer systems and software engineering from York University.

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20. Martin Riedmiller

20. Martin Riedmiller

Publications: 3

Official job title: Research Scientist

Confirmation: Blog

Background: Prior to joining DeepMind just nine months ago, Martin Riedmiller worked on robotics and autonomous learning systems at the University of Freiberg in Germany.

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19.. Shane Legg (cofounder)

19.. Shane Legg (cofounder)

Publications: 3

Official job title: Cofounder and Senior Staff Research Scientist

Confirmation: LinkedIn

Background: Shane Legg used to be DeepMind's Chief Science Officer but when Google bought the company he became a research scientist.

18. Mustafa Suleyman (cofounder)

18. Mustafa Suleyman (cofounder)

Publications: 3

Official job title: Head of Applied AI

Confirmation: LinkedIn

Background: Mustafa Suleyman dropped out of Oxford University at the age of 19 to set up a counselling service known as the Muslim Youth Helpline. He also worked as a policy officer for the former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone.

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17. Karen Simonyan

17. Karen Simonyan

Publications: 4

Official job title: Software Engineer

Confirmation: Google Europe blog

Background: Karen Simonyan is one of the founders of Vision Factory, which was acquired by Google DeepMind in October 2014. At Vision Factory, his aim was to improve visual recognition systems using deep learning.

16. Nal Kalchbrenner

16. Nal Kalchbrenner

Publications: 4

Official job title: Research Scientist

Confirmation: Academic website

Background: Nal Kalchbrenner interned at Google in Mountain View in 2014 for five months before completing a PhD in computer science at the University of Cambridge.

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15. Timothy Lillicrap

15. Timothy Lillicrap

Publications: 4

Official job title: Senior Research Scientist

Confirmation: Online CV

Background: Timothy Lillicrap is interested in the mathematical theories of machine learning and optimal control. He says he is particularly fascinated by the application of these formal frameworks to the study of the central nervous system (CNS).

14. Danilo Jimenez Rezende

14. Danilo Jimenez Rezende

Publications: 4

Official job title: Research Scientist

Confirmation: LinkedIn

Background: Danilo Rezende has a certificate from online learning institution Udacity for his work on "Artificial Intelligence for Robotics: Programming A Robotic Car".

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13. Arthur Guez

13. Arthur Guez

Publications: 4

Official job title: Research Scientist

Confirmation: Personal website

Background: Arthur Guez was a PhD student in the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London. He was supervised by one of the lead programmers on Google's AlphaGo AI (David Silver) and has interned at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.

12. Shakir Mohamed

12. Shakir Mohamed

Publications: 4

Official job title: Research Scientist

Confirmation: Personal website

Background: Shakir completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge with Zoubin Ghahramani, head of the Machine Learning department at the university.

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11. Ivo Danihelka

11. Ivo Danihelka

Publications: 5

Official job title: Unknown

Confirmation: Research Paper

Background: Ivo Danihelka is from the Czech Republic. He sometimes posts about computer science on code repository site GitHub. On his Quora profile, he describes himself as a "programmer interested in machine learning."

10. Nicolas Heess

10. Nicolas Heess

Publications: 5

Official job title: Unknown

Confirmation: Oxford University website

Background: Nicholas Heess was a PhD student at the Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation, University of Edinburgh. On his academic page, Heess states he is interested in understanding information processing in the brain.

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9. Demis Hassabis (cofounder)

9. Demis Hassabis (cofounder)

Publications: 6

Official job title: VP of Engineering

Confirmation: LinkedIn

Background: Demis Hassabis is a child prodigy in chess, reaching master standard at the age of 13 with an Elo rating of 2300 (at the time the second highest rated player in the world Under-14 after Judit Polgár who had a rating of 2335, and is four days older than Hassabis). He's also highly skilled in many other games, including poker.

8. Marc Bellemare

8. Marc Bellemare

Publications: 6

Official job title: Research Scientist

Confirmation: Personal website

Background: On his website, Marc Bellemare writes that he focuses on "reinforcement learning" and in particular "representation learning, value function approximation, model learning, exploration, and all those other concepts that we feel are necessary to the development of generally competent agents."

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7. Ioannis Antonoglou

7. Ioannis Antonoglou

Publications: 6

Official job title: Software Engineer

Confirmation: LinkedIn

Background: Ioannis Antonoglou joined DeepMind in 2012 after graduating from the University of Edinburgh with a masters degree in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

6. Joel Veness

6. Joel Veness

Publications: 6

Official job title: Research Scientist

Confirmation: Personal website

Background: Joel Veness writes on his website that he is "interested in the algorithmic and computational aspects of Artificial Intelligence, with a particular emphasis on scalable and efficient approaches for online Reinforcement Learning agents."

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5. Daan Wierstra

5. Daan Wierstra

Publications: 8

Official job title: Research Scientist

Confirmation: Research paper

Background: Daan Wierstra writes on his personal website that his interests include "spiking neuron models, genetic algorithms and the theoretical properties of evolution strategies, policy gradient based learning methods, and, ultimately, proper, well-founded research into artificial general intelligence."

4. Alex Graves

4. Alex Graves

Publications: 9

Official job title: Research Scientist

Confirmation: CrunchBase

Background: Alex Graves has also worked with Google AI guru Geoff Hinton on neural networks.

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3. Vlad Mnih

3. Vlad Mnih

Publications: 11

Official job title: Research Scientist

Confirmation: Academic website

Background: Vlad Mnih completed a PhD in machine learning at the University of Toronto working under the supervision of Google AI guru Geoffrey Hinton.

2. Koray Kavukcuoglu

2. Koray Kavukcuoglu

Publications: 14

Official job title: Research Scientist

Confirmation: LinkedIn

Background: Koray Kavukcuoglu interned for Google in New York in the summer of 2010 for three months. He also holds a PhD from New York University where he worked on "unsupervised learning of feature extractors and multi-stage architectures for object recognition."

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1. David Silver

1. David Silver

Publications: 16

Official job title: Research scientist

Confirmation: Academic website

Profile: David Silver holds a BA Hounors degree in Computing Science and an MA in Computing Science from the University of Cambridge. He also holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Alberta.

He is a Royal Society University Research Fellow that now carries out research at University College London alongside his duties at Google DeepMind.

He has contributed to many research efforts, with 29 publications listed on his personal website. Here is a full list of all the applications he’s built.

He is, in many ways, Google DeepMind's unsung hero.