David Cox is 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 was founded with a $240m, 10 year commitment from IBM and 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. David’s ongoing research is primarily focused on bringing insights from neuroscience into AI research. His past work has spanned a variety of disciplines, from neuroscience experiments in living brains to the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence methods to applied machine learning and high-performance computing methods.

David has been a speaker and agenda contributor at the World Economic Forum, and he was a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He has received a variety of honors, including the Richard and Susan Smith Foundation Award for Excellence in Biomedical Research, the Google Faculty Research Award in Computer Science, and the Roslyn Abramson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. He taught and led the development of one of Harvard’s first massive open online courses (“The Fundamentals of Neuroscience”; http://fundamentalsofneuroscience.org), which has drawn over 750,000 students from around the world. His academic lab has spawned several startups across a range of industries, ranging from AI for healthcare to autonomous vehicles.