My name is Shakir and I 'm a researcher in statistical machine learning and artificial intelligence. I'm a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind in London. Before that I was a CIFAR scholar with Nando de Freitas at the University of British Columbia, and I completed my PhD with Zoubin Gharahramani at the University of Cambridge. I'm from Johannesburg, South Africa. For more see:

• Web page for more details, papers, etc: www.shakirm.com
• Twitter sharing thoughts on machine learning: @shakir_za
• LinkedIn: shakirm

Why The Spectator?

If anyone ever wonders, the title of this blog is from a series of publications called The Spectator that circulated in England from 1711. The original Spectator sought to provide readers with topics for well-reasoned discussion" and to be "a part of the tea-equipage," although I have no aims "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality".

I love the writing style and wit of Mr Spectator, and I imagined that this blog could, like him, fill the role of a spectator — here thinking of of statistics, machine learning and computational science as one field, and providing a discussion of themes and topics that show the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of the field of machine learning research.