Ali Farhadi serves as CEO of Ai2 and is also a Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He first joined Ai2 in 2015 to lead its computer vision research, focusing on visual common-sense reasoning and how actions and interactions shape visual understanding. During his earlier time at Ai2, he co-founded Xnor.ai, an on-device deep learning startup later acquired by Apple in 2020. He then led next-generation machine learning initiatives at Apple before returning to Ai2 as CEO in July 2023.

A globally recognized AI researcher, Ali’s work has earned multiple best paper awards at major conferences including CVPR, NeurIPS, and AAAI, along with an NSF CAREER Award and a Sloan Fellowship.

Before joining the University of Washington faculty in 2012, Ali was a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.