Our team

Prior to joining VinAI, he held critical positions at Google DeepMind, Adobe Research, and Nuance Natural Language Understanding Lab. He also spent almost a decade at the AI Center, SRI International (formerly Stanford Research Institute), where he led the multi-institution research team in developing probabilistic inference technologies for understanding user activities during the CALO project. It was the largest AI project at the time and led to Apple's Siri.

His technical expertise and interests range from probabilistic graphical models, deep generative models, Bayesian inference to machine- learning especially models for sequential and relational data with applications in human activity/intent recognition, video understanding, and natural language processing. Such interests revolve around one question: How to make machines understand humans better?

Going further back in time, he was an Associate Professor at Curtin University, Australia (2000-2003), where he also attained his PhD in Computer Science (1998).

Annie started her career in UX and Machine Learning at Robert Bosch's Silicon Valley research center. During this time at Bosch Annie also moonlighted on the weekends as Team Leader of Team AnnieWay for DARPA Urban Challenge 2007, where AnnieWay was an “underdog” team with very little money, manpower, resources and time, and against all odds, successfully qualified as a Finalist for the DARPA race. Thereafter, at VW Group’s Silicon Valley innovation lab, Annie co-created and led companywide initiatives on USA Product, PR, Legal, and Governmental Affairs for Audi Autonomous Driving. After Audi/VW Annie spent 6+ years in the startup world of innovative solutions for self-driving cars and robotics automation; advised / consulted entrepreneurs, investors, auto OEMs, suppliers and other entities on autonomous driving; joined Toyota’s Silicon Valley lab; and briefly co-led Hexagon’s Autonomous Solutions group. Today, Annie is excited about her current journey as Deputy CEO at VinAI.