Daphne Koller

Early life Koller was born on August 27, 1968, in Jerusalem, Israel. 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, at the age of 18. She completed her PhD at Stanford in 1993 under the supervision of Joseph Halpern.

Career and research

After her PhD, Koller did postdoctoral research at University of California, Berkeley from 1993 to 1995 under Stuart J. Russell, and joined the faculty of the Stanford University computer science department in 1995. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2004. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 for contributions to representation, inference, and learning in probabilistic models with applications to robotics, vision, and biology. She was also elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014 and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2023.

In April 2008, Koller was awarded the first ever $150,000 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences.

She and Andrew Ng, a fellow Stanford computer science professor in the AI lab, founded Coursera in 2012. She served as the co-CEO with Ng, and then as president of Coursera. She was recognized for her contributions to online education by being named one of Newsweeks 10 Most Important People in 2010, Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2012, and Fast Companys Most Creative People in 2014.

She left Coursera in 2016 to become chief computing officer at Calico. The company operates an automated lab equipment running on algorithms that use its own in vitro disease models. The process allows the combination of machine learning and genomics to predict as well as test treatments for diseases. Along with Suchi Saria and Anna Penn of Stanford University, Koller developed PhysiScore, which uses various data elements to predict whether premature babies are likely to have health issues.

Koller's work on artificial intelligence builds on Bayes' theorem, an 18th-century result about probability named after the mathematician Thomas Bayes. The approach underpins the process of transforming a current assumption about an event into a more accurate assumption based on more evidence. She offers a course on the subject.

In 2020, Koller co-founded the startup Engageli, which developed an alternative to the Zoom app. Its online learning platform addressed problems such as low student engagement, featuring what the company called as “superior” learning experience that includes real-time evaluations to determine whether students are keeping up.

Her former doctoral students include Lise Getoor,

Honors and awards 1994: Arthur Samuel Thesis Award 1996: Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship 2008: ACM/Infosys Award 2013: Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People 2014: Fast Companys Most Creative People in Business 2017: Elected ISCB Fellow by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) 2019: ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award for contributions with significant breadth across computing, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines 2022: Technical Leadership Abie Award Winner 2023: Elected to National Academy of Sciences 2024: Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in AI

Books

Koller's book authorships include:

Koller contributed one chapter to the 2018 book Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it by the American futurist Martin Ford. Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques by Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman.

Personal life Koller is married to Dan Avida, a venture capitalist at Opus Capital.