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Biography
Daphne Koller (born August 27, 1968) is an Israeli-American Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and a MacArthur Fellowship recipient. She is also one of the founders of Coursera, an online education platform. Her general research area is artificial intelligence and its applications in the biomedical sciences. Koller was featured in a 2004 article by MIT Technology Review titled "10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World" concerning the topic of Bayesian machine learning.
Life
She received a bachelor's degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1985, at the age of 17, and a master's degree from the same institution in 1986.
Koller completed her Ph.D. at Stanford in 1993 under the supervision of Joseph Halpern, did postdoctoral research at University of California, Berkeley from 1993 to 1995, and joined the faculty of the Stanford University Computer Science Department in 1995. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2004, was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 and was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014.
In April 2008, Daphne Koller was awarded the first ever $150,000 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences.
In 2009, she published a textbook on probabilistic graphical models together with Nir Friedman. She offered a free online course on the subject starting in February 2012.
She and Andrew Ng, a fellow Stanford computer science professor in the AI lab, launched Coursera in 2012. She served as the CEO and then President of Coursera. She was recognized for her contributions to online education by being named one of Newsweek's 10 Most Important People in 2010, Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2012, and Fast Company's Most Creative People in 2014.
She left Coursera in 2016 to become chief computing officer at Calico.
She is married to Dan Avida.
Honors and awards
- 1994. Arthur Samuel Thesis Award
- 1996. Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship
- 1998. ONR Young Investigator Award
- 1999. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)
- 2001. IJCAI Computers and Thoughts Award
- 2003. Cox Medal at Stanford
- 2004. MacArthur Fellow
- 2008. ACM/Infosys Award
- 2010. Newsweek's 10 Most Important People
- 2010. Huffington Post 100 Game Changers
- 2011. Elected to National Academy of Engineering
- 2013. Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People
- 2014. Elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- 2014. Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business
Selected works
Books
- 2009. probabilistic graphical models. (with Nir Friedman). MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262013192