Jure Leskovec

Jure Leskovec (born May 1980) is a Slovenian computer scientist, entrepreneur and professor of Computer Science at Stanford University focusing on networks. He was the chief scientist at Pinterest and co-founder / chief scientist AI graph-ML startup Kumo.

Early life and education Leskovec was born in May 1980 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 2004, Leskovec received a Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, researching semantic networks-based creation of abstracts, using machine learning; in 2008 he received a PhD in Computational and Statistical Learning from the Carnegie Mellon University.

After finishing his PhD, Leskovec worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University for a year. During this time, he was advised by Jon Kleinberg.

Research and career After his postdoctoral stint at Cornell University, Leskovec joined the faculty of Stanford University as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science in 2009. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2016.

His general research area is applied machine learning and data science for large interconnected systems. His work focuses on modeling complex, richly-labeled relational structures, graphs, and networks for systems at all scales, from interactions of proteins in a cell to interactions between humans in a society. His research finds applications in a variety of settings including commonsense reasoning, recommender systems, computational social science, and computational biology with an emphasis on drug discovery.

Leskovec co-founded a startup called Kosei in 2014 that was acquired by Pinterest in 2015.

As of 2025, Leskovec is working on another startup called Kumo AI, which helps Data Scientists ship predictive models faster and more accurately.

Awards and honors Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, 2011. Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, 2012. Lagrange Prize, 2015. SIGKDD Innovation Award, 2023.

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