Wojciech Zaremba

Wojciech Zaremba
Residence	San Francisco, California
Nationality	Polish
Fields	Mathematics Computer Science
Institutions	OpenAI
Alma mater	New York University
Doctoral advisor	Yann LeCun Rob Fergus

Wojciech Zaremba (born November 30, 1988) is a Polish mathematician and computer scientist, noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. In 2015, Zaremba co-founded OpenAI, with a mission to build safe artificial intelligence (AI), and ensure that its benefits are as evenly distributed as possible.^[1][2]

Early life

Zaremba was born in 1988 in Kluczbork, Poland. At a young age, he began winning awards for his brilliance in mathematics, computer science, chemistry and physics, in local competitions.^[3] As a child passionate about chemistry, he built two functioning chemical laboratories where he completed his experiments. In his teens, his focus shifted from chemistry to computer science and mathematics. In 2007, Zaremba represented Poland in the International Mathematical Olympiad, and won a silver medal.^[4]

Zaremba studied at the University of Warsaw and École Polytechnique, and graduated in 2013 with two master's degrees in mathematics. He then began his PhD at New York University (NYU) in deep learning under the supervision of Yann LeCun and Rob Fergus.^[5] Zaremba graduated and received his PhD in just 2.5 years,^[6][7] setting a record at NYU.

Career

During his undergraduate years at the University of Warsaw, Zaremba completed several internships for American technology company NVIDIA. The graphics card Zaremba assisted on the development of during his time at NVIDIA, would later turn into a cornerstone hardware for deep learning research^[8]

Alongside his work with NVIDIA, Zaremba was becoming involved in startup businesses. But he would soon realize he was more interested in research than business. He resigned his positions and focused completely on research.

In the following years, Zaremba’s fame would grow, as during an internship at Google he was able to reproduce state-of-the-art object-recognition modeling developed originally by DNNresearch. Elements of this model were used in Google+’s photo search feature.

His continued success and contribution led to his work at Google Brain,^[9] alongside some of the world’s most famous contemporary scientists including Prof. Geoffrey Hinton, and Ilya Sutskever. In the following year, Zaremba spent time at Facebook AI Research^[10] under the supervision of Prof. Rob Fergus and Prof. Yann LeCun^[11][12][13]

In 2015, Zaremba co-founded OpenAI,^[14] a non-profit artificial intelligence (AI) research company, associated with business magnate Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and others, with an aim to carefully promote and develop friendly AI in such a way as to benefit, rather than harm, humanity as a whole. Zaremba currently leads a research team that is focused on building a fully automated household robot.

Zaremba sits on the advisory board of Growbots,^[15] a Silicon Valley startup company aiming to automate sales processes with the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Honors and awards

• Aleksander Kwaśniewski President Scholarship for talented children^[16]
• Scholar of Polish Children's Fund from 2000 to 2007
• Silver Medal in 48th International Mathematical Olympiad, Vietnam^[17]
• 3rd place, 7th Czech-Polish-Slovakian Mathematical Competition 2007
• Second Prize, 15th International Mathematics Competition, Bulgaria 2008^[18]
• 26th place ^[19] and 14th place,^[20] Vojtech Jarnik International Mathematical Competition 2008, 2011
• Hadamard Foundation Scholarship^[21]
• Google Fellowship 2015^[22]

References