Alexander Smola

Alex studied physics in Munich at the University of Technology, Munich, at the University of Pavia and at AT&T Research in Holmdel. During this time, Alex was at the Maximilianeum München and the Collegio Ghislieri in Pavia. In 1996, he received his Master's degree at the University of Technology, Munich, and in 1998 his Doctoral Degree in computer science at the University of Technology Berlin. Until 1999, Alex was a researcher at the IDA Group of the GMD Institute for Software Engineering and Computer Architecture in Berlin (now part of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft). After that, Alex worked as a Researcher and Group Leader at the Research School for Information Sciences and Engineering of the Australian National University. From 2004 onwards, he worked as a Senior Principal Researcher and Program Leader at the Statistical Machine Learning Program at NICTA, now part of Data61 CSIRO. From 2008 to 2012, Alex worked at Yahoo! Research. In spring of 2012, he moved to Google Research to spend a wonderful year in Mountain View, and continued working there until the end of 2014. From 2013-2017, Alex was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He co-founded Marianas Labs in early 2015. In July 2016, he moved to Amazon Web Services to help build AI and Machine Learning tools for everyone. In 2023, Alex co-founded Boson AI.