James Bergstra

Director of AI Platform, Ocado Technology

James Bergstra completed a PhD in deep learning at the University of Montreal with Yoshua Bengio and was the first lead author of the Theano deep learning library. In postdoctoral work at Harvard with David Cox, he developed hyper-parameter optimization methods that became the Hyperopt project and that helped found the subfield of automatic machine learning. In further postdoctoral research at the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo as an NSERC Banting Fellow, he helped re-architect the Nengo computational system for simulating large functional spiking brain models. At Kindred, as cofounder, Chief Science Officer, and now Chief Technology Officer, he is drawing all these and other threads together to build human-like intelligence in machines.