Machinery of Grace

Shakir Mohamed is a scientist and community-organiser in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Shakir is a senior staff scientist at DeepMind in London. His research focusses on the interface between probabilistic reasoning, deep learning and reinforcement learning, and how the solutions that emerge at that intersection can be used to develop general-purpose learning systems and in addressing global challenges. Shakir also leads the Deep Learning Indaba, an independent grassroots organisation whose mission is to build pan-African capacity and ownership in AI. He previously held a Junior Research Fellowship from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). Shakir holds a PhD in Statistical Machine Learning from the University of Cambridge, and is from Johannesburg, South Africa, where he completed his undergraduate and master's degrees in electrical and information engineering.