Research Scientist at DeepMind, England
Ulrich Paquet is a senior staff research scientist at DeepMind, one of the world's foremost AI companies. His most recent work on AlphaZero include a collaboration with Vladimir Kramnik on how small rule adjustments to chess would alter the game at a superhuman level. He is deeply interested in how AlphaZero discovers and acquires chess knowledge automatically, and has done research showing how it represents human chess concepts.
He holds a PhD in machine learning from the University of Cambridge. Ulrich joined DeepMind in 2016, and has worked in tech companies such as Microsoft, Imense, VocalIQ and Apple before. He was on the Xbox One launch team, where he co-developed the core of the recommender system. Having grown up in South Africa, he cares deeply about the growth of mathematical sciences in Africa. In his spare time, he is a co-founder and co-director of Deep Learning Indaba, a grassroots initiative to strengthen machine learning in Africa. To date, it has run AI schools in almost 30 countries in Africa, with many flowers now blooming between the grass roots!
