Biography

Ohad Shamir is an (incoming) professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Toronto, a faculty member and Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute, and a professor (currently on leave) at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. In the more distant past, he also spent a year at Google Research (Tel-Aviv), and several years as a postdoctoral, associate and visiting researcher at Microsoft Research. He completed a PhD in 2010 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, advised by Naftali Tishby. His work focuses on theoretical machine learning, in areas such as theory of deep learning, the intersection of machine learning and optimization, and learning under information and communication constraints.

He served as a program co-chair of the Conference on Learning Theory (COLT), as well as a member of its steering committee, and as an action editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR). His honours include the inaugural 2024 Prize in the Mathematics of Artificial Intelligence, several best paper awards, the Hebrew University's PhD thesis prize, and a €1.5 million ERC grant.