Durk Kingma

Diederik P. Kingmae-mail: dpkingma [at] gmail [dot] com

I'm an AI researcher, currently at Google. My contributions include the Variational Autoencoder (VAE), the Adam optimizer, Inverse Autoregressive Flow (IAF), and Glow. More generally my main research interests are at the intersection of deep learning with topics such as generative models, variational (Bayesian) inference, stochastic optimization, and identifiability. Before Google, I obtained a PhD (cum laude) from University of Amsterdam in 2017, and was part of the founding team of OpenAI in 2015. Before that, I co-founded Advanza which got acquired in 2016.

My formal first name is Diederik, but people also call me Durk, which is a Frisian name that is pronounced like the English name Dirk.

I live in San Francisco.

Brief Bio

2018 - Present: Senior Research Scientist at Google Research (San Francisco). I work on generative models, identifiability, among other topics.

2015 - 2018: Part of founding team and Research Scientist at OpenAI (San Francisco). Lead of the Algorithms team, focused on basic research.

2013 - 2017: Ph.D. (cum laude) at University of Amsterdam, advised by Max Welling, on the topic of deep learning and generative models. Thesis: Variational Inference and Deep Learning: A New Synthesis.

2010 - 2016: Co-founder of Advanza, a successful lead generation bussiness, sold in 2016.

Publications

See my Google Scholar profile for a complete list.

Variational Inference and Deep Learning: A New Synthesis

Ph.D. Thesis. Download at Dropbox or at UvA.

Demos

Links

Awards and Honors

2020: The AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Award "in recognition of outstanding and vibrant contributions in the field of Machine Learning 2009-2019".

2019: The Dutch Datascience Award, from the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, for my contributions in machine learning research.

2019: The ELLIS PhD Award for "outstanding research achievements during the dissertation phase of outstanding students working in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning".

2017: PhD with 'cum laude', highest distinction in the Netherlands, and first time it was awarded at the CS department in 30 years.

2015: Google's first European Doctoral Fellowship in Deep Learning.

Some research demos that I (co-)developed:These places are updated more frequently than this website:The end. Want more? Click one of the blue links.