Daphne Koller, who’s pursuing the “next level” of artificial intelligence, using Bayesian methods, has just received an award from the ACM and the Infosys Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Indian computer services firm. Anyway, I found her bio interesting:
Ms. Koller grew up in an academic family in Israel, the daughter of a botanist and an English professor. While her father spent a year at Stanford in 1981 when she was 12, she began programming on a Radio Shack PC that she shared with another student.When her family returned to Israel the next year, she told her father, the botanist, that she was bored with high school and wanted to pursue something more stimulating in college. After half a year, she persuaded him to let her enter Hebrew University, where she studied computer science and mathematics.
By 17, she was teaching a database course at the university. The next year she received her master’s degree and then joined the Israeli Army before coming to the United States to study for a Ph.D. at Stanford.
She didn’t spend her time looking at a computer monitor. “I find it distressing that the view of the field is that you sit in your office by yourself surrounded by old pizza boxes and cans of Coke, hacking away at the bowels of the Windows operating system,” she said. “I spend most of my time thinking about things like how does a cell work or how do we understand images in the world around us?”