Andrew Ng is a renowned figure in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Born in London in 1976 and raised in Hong Kong and Singapore, he went on to study at Carnegie Mellon University, where he earned degrees in computer science, statistics, and economics. He later received a master’s degree from MIT and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
In academia, Ng became an associate professor at Stanford University and served as director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research focused on deep learning, robotics, and machine learning. He led the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter project and founded the STAIR project, which contributed to the development of the Robot Operating System (ROS), a widely used open-source robotics platform.
Ng is also known for his work in online education. In 2012, he co-founded Coursera with Daphne Koller, a platform that offers free and paid online courses from leading universities and organizations, helping to make high-quality education accessible around the world.
In the tech industry, Ng founded the Google Brain project, which applied large-scale neural networks to real-world problems. One notable result of this work was training a neural network to recognize images of cats without explicit labeling. He later became Chief Scientist at Baidu, where he built and led the company’s AI Group before stepping down in 2017.
Widely recognized for his contributions, Ng has been named among Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. Today, he remains a leading advocate for the ethical and accessible advancement of artificial intelligence and continues to focus on AI education and real-world applications.
