Alex SMOLA

Alex Smola is CEO and cofounder of Boson AI. He studied physics at the University of Technology in Munich in 1996 and his PhD at the University of Technology in Berlin in 1998. During this time he worked at AT&T Research in Holmdel and later at the Institute of Software Engineering and Computer Architecture in Berlin. From 2000 to 2008 he was Senior Principal Researcher and Program Leader at the Australian National University and NICTA (now part of Data61 CSIRO). Thereafter he joined Yahoo Research in 2008-2012, Google Strategic Technologies in 2012-2015 and cofounded Marianas Labs in 2015. He was adjunct faculty at UC Berkeley in 2012 and 2020 and at Stanford in 2021. Moreover, he was full professor at Carnegie Mellon University in 2013-2017. After 7 years at Amazon Web Services (2016-2023) as VP and Distinguished Scientist he founded Boson AI to explore large language models for human user interaction and entertainment.

His research interests span the range from Kernel Methods, Bayesian Nonparametrics and Statistical Learning Theory to Machine Learning for Systems and Deep Learning. He has authored more than 250 papers and written and edited 6 books, including Learning with Kernels and most recently, Dive into Deep Learning (D2L).