Richard Zemel

Program :

Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception

Appointment :

Fellow

Institution :

University of Toronto

Country :

Canada

Richard Zemel is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.  He received a B.A. degree in History and Science, focusing on Applied Mathematics and American History, from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, where Dr. Geoff Hinton was his supervisor.  From 1993 to 1996, Dr. Zemel held postdoctoral fellowships at the Salk Institute’s Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and later at the Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University.  He was an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona from 1996-2000.  He joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 2000 and in 2004, he spent some time as a visiting faculty member in the Department of Biophysics at Princeton University.

Dr. Zemel's current research focuses on various aspects of machine learning, particularly unsupervised learning, boosting, and probabilistic networks; and applications such as image segmentation, and collaborative filtering. He is also interested in neural coding, and has spent quite a bit of time working in the areas of perceptual learning, motion perception, and visual attention.