Alex Graves

Education Graves earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Theoretical Physics from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the Technical University of Munich supervised by Jürgen Schmidhuber at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research.

Career and research After his PhD, Graves was postdoc working with Schmidhuber at the Technical University of Munich and Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto.

At the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research, Graves trained long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks by a novel method called connectionist temporal classification (CTC). This method outperformed traditional speech recognition models in certain applications. In 2009, his CTC-trained LSTM was the first recurrent neural network (RNN) to win pattern recognition contests, winning several competitions in connected handwriting recognition. Google uses CTC-trained LSTM for speech recognition on the smartphone.

Graves is also the creator of neural Turing machines and the closely related differentiable neural computer. In 2023, he wrote the paper Bayesian Flow Networks. He currently works as a Staff Research Scientist at InstaDeep. He was previously a research scientist at Google DeepMind in London.