Ben Poole
Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBen Poole is a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind with 19 years bridging machine learning, computer vision, and computational neuroscience. He holds a PhD from Stanford and a long history at Google where he advanced generative models, semi-supervised learning, and adversarial training before moving into DeepMind research. Ben contributes to high-profile open research at Google Research—implementing variational mutual information bounds and resolving JAX compilation issues—demonstrating both theoretical depth and practical engineering chops. His background spans neuro-inspired computational work from CMU undergrad projects to real-time neural decoding and fMRI analysis, giving him a rare blend of neuroscience intuition and production ML experience. Based in San Francisco, he excels at translating rigorous research into robust, reproducible code and shipping algorithms that scale.
18 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, Cognitive Science, BS, Computer Science, Cognitive Science at Carnegie Mellon UniversityPhD, Computer Science, PhD, Computer Science at Stanford University
Github Skills (5)
machine-learning10
python10
tensorflow9
jax9
ai9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
google-research/google-research
Jun 2019 - Oct 2022
Google Research
Role in this project:
ML Engineer
ML EngineerContributions:6 commits in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Ben primarily contributes to the variational bounds of mutual information research, specifically within the context of a Google Research project. Their work includes implementing variational bounds and working with existing lower bounds. The user also applies these bounds to a toy Gaussian problem and makes improvements related to compilation issues with JAX.
googlemachine-learningai
poolio/bilateral_solver
Nov 2015 - Oct 2016
Python code for the fast bilateral solver
Contributions:8 commits, 3 pushes, 1 issue in 11 months
bilateralpython-codepythonsolver
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