David Cox leads IBM’s AI strategy and the AI model development and training program at IBM Research. He is also the IBM Director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a first of its kind industry-academic collaboration between IBM and MIT, focused on fundamental research in artificial intelligence. The Lab brings together researchers at IBM with faculty at MIT to tackle hard problems at the vanguard of AI.

Prior to joining IBM, David was the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences and of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he held appointments in Computer Science, the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and the Center for Brain Science.

His lab at Harvard started several widely-used open source projects, including Hyperopt, one of the first frameworks for hyperparameter optimization of AI models, and Triton (now OpenAI Triton) a framework for accelerated compute on GPUs. While at Harvard, he also co-founded several AI startups, including DeepHealth (acquired by RadNet, Inc.), which developed multiple FDA-cleared AI-based medical imaging solutions that have been deployed at scale.

David earned an undergraduate degree at Harvard University and a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.