creators

Rachel Thomas - fast.ai co-founder, Answer.AI R&D

Rachel Thomas co-founded fast.ai, founded USF's Center for Applied Data Ethics and now works in R&D at Answer.AI from Brisbane, writing on AI in medicine.

Rachel Thomas is an American computer scientist and educator. She earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Swarthmore College in 2005 and a PhD in mathematics from Duke University in 2010, then worked as a quantitative analyst at Exelon and as an engineer at Uber, where she built the driver interface and surge algorithms, and taught at Hackbright Academy. In 2016 she co-founded fast.ai with Jeremy Howard to make deep learning easier to reach; its free Practical Deep Learning for Coders is, by fast.ai's account, the longest-running deep learning course in the world. She founded the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Francisco, taught graduate courses there on natural language processing and computational linear algebra, and has written widely on bias, diversity and ethics in machine learning. Forbes named her one of 20 women advancing AI research in 2017. Thomas now works in research and development at Answer.AI, the lab Jeremy Howard founded after fast.ai, and lives in Brisbane, Australia. Her own site and fast.ai's both list her as a Professor of Practice at Queensland University of Technology's Centre for Data Science; QUT's centre no longer lists her among its people. Her recent writing is mostly about AI in medicine and the life sciences.

Specialization

deep learning education, data ethics, AI in medicine, algorithmic bias

Country

Australia