I am a founding researcher at fast.ai, and an honorary professor at the University of Queensland. If and when I find some time, I’ll flesh this personal web site out a little more. In the meantime, here’s a quick list of a few of the things I’ve created (or co-created):

Deep Learning and Machine Learning

• Answer.AI (with Eric Ries), a new kind of AI R&D lab which creates practical end-user products based on foundational research breakthroughs.
• The ULMFiT algorithm for training large language models (LLMs), on which all modern LLMs (including ChatGPT, Bard, etc) are based, and which helped to crack the code of natural language.
• course.fast.ai, which is the longest-running and (AFAIK) most widely-used deep learning course in the world, and has launched many careers in research, industry, and startups. The Economist featured the course in their article “New schemes teach the masses to build AI – Treating it like a craft is paying dividends”. I am an honorary professor at the University of Queensland and have taught parts of the course from there.
• Deep Learning for Coders with Fastai and PyTorch: AI Applications Without a PhD, a book, based on the course, which has 5 stars on Amazon. Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig, says “The book does an impressive job of covering the key applications of deep learning in computer vision, natural language processing, and tabular data processing, but also covers key topics like data ethics that some other books miss. Altogether, this is one of the best sources for a programmer to become proficient in deep learning.”
• The fastai software library, one of the world’s most popular deep learning frameworks. The underlying principles have been published in the peer reviewed journal Information, and the source code is freely available. I’ve created many other software libraries and tools, including nbdev, which is rapidly gaining many fans for making it much easier to create high-quality software, and fastpages, which powers the blog you’re reading now.
• Kaggle, the world’s largest data science community, where I was the founding President and Chief Scientist (and reached #1 on the global machine learning competition leaderboard!)
• Record breaking deep learning performance on Dawnbench, with some of my brilliant students.

Medicine

• The global masks4all movement, including leading the largest evidence review of masks, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and becoming the most read paper of all time on preprints.org. I also wrote articles in the Washington Post, Guardian, The Atlantic, The Conversation, and the Sydney Morning Herald, and appeared on most of the major national US TV channels, including Good Morning America and Nightline
• Enlitic, the world’s first company to focus on deep learning for medicine, where I raised $15m within 2 years of creating the company. MIT Tech Review ranked it #14 on their list of the Smartest Companies in the World, just ahead of Facebook and SpaceX
• The Wicklow AI in Medicine Research Initiative at the University of San Francisco, where as Founding Chair I built partnerships with UCSF, Harvard, Stanford, and many other academic medical centers, which resulted in some significant published medical research breakthroughs

Other startups

• FastMail, the first (AFAIK) company to provide synchronized email for consumers
• Optimal Decisions Group, where I invented profit-optimized pricing for insurance, which is now used by nearly all home and auto insurers, and also created the Drive-train Method to building data products

Other stuff

• “The wonderful and terrifying implications of computers that learn”, a talk on TED.com that has received over 2.5m views, now translated into 26 languages
• The Data Science group at Singularity University, where as the first data science faculty member I gave many talks and mentored student projects
• The Leveraging Customer Information group at AT Kearney, which was an international machine learning and data analytics practice we created back in the mid-90s. (I was the first analytical specialist at McKinsey & Co in Australia in the early-90s; at that time there were only two other analytical specialists world-wide at the company.)

For answers to many, many questions, you can read my AMA on Reddit. It’s from 2014, but most of the answers are still fairly relevant today.

Find me on: Mastodon.