Alex Krizhevsky is a computer scientist known for his significant contributions to the field of artificial intelligence, particularly in deep learning and computer vision. He gained prominence for his work on AlexNet, a deep convolutional neural network that he co-developed with Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton. AlexNet achieved a breakthrough in the 2012 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC), significantly outperforming the competition and marking a pivotal moment in the adoption of deep learning techniques across various fields of AI research and application.
Krizhevsky completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto and continued his graduate studies there, working under the supervision of Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer in neural networks and deep learning. The development of AlexNet was part of his Ph.D. work, and the success of this project had a profound impact on the AI community, demonstrating the capabilities of deep neural networks in processing and understanding visual data.
After his work on AlexNet and completing his Ph.D., Krizhevsky joined Google, contributing to the Google Brain team, which focuses on deep learning and artificial intelligence research. Later, he also co-founded a startup named DNNresearch with Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton, which was acquired by Google in 2013. This acquisition further integrated their expertise into Google's efforts to advance AI technologies.
Krizhevsky's work on AlexNet has been recognized as a catalyst for the current interest and advancements in deep learning, inspiring a new generation of AI research that leverages deep neural networks for a wide range of applications, from image and speech recognition to natural language processing and beyond. Despite his relatively low public profile compared to some of his contemporaries, Krizhevsky's contributions have had a lasting impact on the field of artificial intelligence.
Further Reading
Story from Quartz Magazine from 2018