Daphne Koller

Daphne Koller (Hebrew: דפנה קולר; born August 27, 1968) is an Israeli-American computer scientist. She was a professor in the department of computer science at Stanford University[4] and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient.[1] She is one of the founders of Coursera, an online education platform. Her general research area is artificial intelligence[5][6] and its applications in the biomedical sciences.[7] Koller was featured in a 2004 article by MIT Technology Review titled "10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World"[8] concerning the topic of Bayesian machine learning.[9][10] Koller was born on August 27, 1968, in Jerusalem, Israel.[11] 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.[12] She completed her PhD at Stanford in 1993 under the supervision of Joseph Halpern.[2] After her PhD, Koller did postdoctoral research at University of California, Berkeley from 1993 to 1995 under Stuart J. Russell,[13] 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.[14] In April 2008, Koller was awarded the first ever $150,000 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences.[15] 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 Newsweek's 10 Most Important People in 2010, Time magazine's 100 Most Influen