Neil Lawrence

Neil Lawrence is the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Computer Science and Technology where he also leads the Accelerate Programme for Scientific Discovery. He has a Senior AI Fellowship from the Alan Turing Institute. He is a co-host of the “Talking Machines” podcast and a Visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield.

He received his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southampton in 1994. Following a period as a field engineer on oil rigs in the North Sea, he returned to academia to complete his PhD in 2000 at the Computer Lab at Cambridge University. He spent a year at Microsoft Research in Cambridge before leaving to take up a Lectureship at the University of Sheffield, where he was subsequently appointed Senior Lecturer in 2005. In January 2007 he took up a post as a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science in the University of Manchester where he worked in the Machine Learning and Optimisation research group. In August 2010 he returned to Sheffield to take up a collaborative Chair in Neuroscience and Computer Science. From 2016 to 2019 he was Director of Machine Learning at Amazon where he worked on deploying machine learning solutions for Prime Air, Alexa and in the Amazon supply chain.

Neil was Associate Editor in Chief for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (from 2011-2013) and is an Action Editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research. He was the founding editor of the Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (2006) and is currently the series editor. He was an area chair for the NIPS conference in 2005, 2006, 2012 and 2013, Workshops Chair in 2010 and Tutorials Chair in 2013. He was the General Chair of AISTATS in 2010 and AISTATS Programme Chair in 2012. He was the Program Chair of NIPS in 2014 and was General Chair for 2015. He is one of the founders of the Gaussian Process Summer School, the DALI Meeting and Data Science Africa and is a member of the UK’s AI Council, chair of the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation’s advisory board, and a member of Innovate Cambridge’s steering committee.