Andrew Ng Biography

Andrew Ng was born Andrew Yan-Tak Ng, on April 18, 1976, in the UK, to Ronald P. Ng and Tisa Ho, who were immigrants from Hong Kong. He has a brother.

He grew up in Hong Kong and Singapore. In 1992, he graduated from Raffles Institution.

In 1997, he obtained his undergraduate degree with a triple major in economics, computer science, and statistics, from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. From 1996 to 1998, he conducted research at the AT&T Bell Labs, working on model selection, reinforcement learning, and feature selection.

He obtained his master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge in 1998. While at MIT, he created the first publicly available and automatically indexed online search engine for research papers. He received his PhD degree from UC Berkeley in 2002.

In 2002, Andrew Ng began his career as an assistant professor in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments of Stanford University. In 2009, he became an associate professor at the same university.

He has also served as a director at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), teaching students and conducting research related to big data, data mining, and machine learning. His machine learning course CS229 was a huge success at Stanford.

In 2008, he popularized the use of GPUs in deep learning. He now works as an adjunct professor at Stanford.

In 2002, Andrew Ng began his research on robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI), while teaching at Stanford. In 2011, he spearheaded the development of Stanford’s primary MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform, while teaching an online machine learning class to more than 100,000 students.

His early work also includes the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter project, which built one of the most efficient autonomous helicopters of the world. He also worked on the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) project, which led to the development of the open-source robotics software platform ROS.

Later, from 2011 to 2012, he worked at Google, where, teaming up with Greg Corrado and Jeff Dean, he founded the Google Brain Deep Learning Project. Google Brain makes use of large-scale computing resources and systems engineering and combines it with open-ended machine learning research.

It led to the development of Google Cat, which was composed of a huge neural network of a billion parameters gathered from unlabeled YouTube videos, to detect cats. Of late, Andrew still works on deep learning and its use in computer vision and speech, including applications such as autonomous driving.

In 2012, Andrew, along with Daphne Koller, founded Coursera, the online learning platform that teams up with universities to offer online degrees and courses, in subjects such as social sciences, medicine, engineering, humanities, computer science, math, business, machine learning, and data science. His primary aim was to provide everyone access to quality education, for free.

Coursera now partners with some of the best global universities to offer quality online courses and is the world’s largest MOOC platform. In 2014, he began working as a chief scientist with Baidu, leading a 1300-person AI group.

While he was there, the company developed global expertise in areas such as machine learning, natural language processing, and AI speech recognition. In September 2016, he launched the open-source deep learning platform PaddlePaddle. In March 2017, he resigned from Baidu.

In October that year, Andrew founded the platform Landing AI, which was geared to help companies transform into great AI companies. In 2018, he launched the start-up studio AI Fund, aimed at building new AI companies.

The following year, he launched the new course AI for Everyone, while announcing the opening of a new office in Medellín, Colombia, devoted solely to AI research. He has thus built his identity as the founder of DeepLearning.AI, the founder & CEO of Landing AI, a partner at AI Fund, and the chairman and co-founder of Coursera. Andrew has been invited to deliver talks at MIT, UC Berkeley, Cornell, Princeton, Stanford, UPenn, the Max Planck Society, Microsoft, Google, Lockheed Martin, and NASA.

In 1996, Andrew Ng received the Andrew Carnegie Society Scholarship. From 1998 to 2000, he was awarded the Berkeley Fellowship.

From 2001 to 2002, he was awarded the Microsoft Research Fellowship. In 2007, Andrew received the Sloan Fellowship.

In 2008, Andrew made it to the list of the top 35 global innovators under the age of 35 on MIT Technology Review TR35. In 2009, his work in AI earned him the Computers and Thought Award.

In 2013, he was featured on TIME 100, Time magazine’s list of the most influential people in the world. The same year, he was featured on Fortune's 40 under 40 and on CNN 10: Thinker.

Andrew Ng has either authored or co-authored more than 100 published papers on robotics, machine learning, and associated fields. Some of his research in computer vision has been showcased in a series of reviews and press releases.

He has written for Harvard Business Review, Apple News, and HuffPost. He also contributes to a weekly digital newsletter titled The Batch.

He wrote and distributed the book Machine Learning Yearning for free. In December 2018, he penned a sequel to the book, titled AI Transformation Playbook.

In 2014, Andrew Ng married Carol E. Reiley. They apparently first met in Kobe, while attending the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Carol is an American writer, computer scientist, and entrepreneur. She is a Computer Engineering graduate from Santa Clara University and the first female engineer to be featured on the cover of MAKE magazine.

Their engagement was announced in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers magazine IEEE Spectrum. They were named an “AI power couple” by The MIT Tech Review.

The couple has two children: their daughter Nova, born in 2019, and their son, born in 2021. The family live in Los Altos Hills, California.