Michael Osborne (academic)

Michael Osborne (born 1982^[1]) is an Australian academic and scientist who serves as a professor of machine learning at University of Oxford in the Machine Learning Research Group in the Department of Engineering Science.^[2]

In 2016 he co-founded Mind Foundry,^[3] an artificial intelligence company, along with fellow professor Stephen Roberts.^[4]

Osborne suffered from long COVID syndrome.^[1] He is an advocate for masking to limit the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID disease.^[5]

Education

He has a BEng in Mechanical Engineering and a BSc in both Pure Mathematics and Physics from the University of Western Australia.^[6] He has a PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Oxford.^[7]

Career

Osborne has contributed to over 100 publications,^[8] and his work has received over 24,000 citations with an h-index of 46 according to Google Scholar.^[9] and has acted as principal or co-investigator for £10.6M of research funding.^[10]

His career has focused in particular on Bayesian approaches to AI and machine learning, named after the famous British statistician Thomas Bayes.^[11] Osborne's work has contributed to Probabilistic numerics, with Osborne co-authoring the first textbook on the subject.^[12]

In 2013, Osborne co-authored a paper alongside Swedish-German economist Carl Benedikt Frey called "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?".^[13] The paper has received over 13,000 citations and extensive media coverage.^[14][15][16]

In 2023 Osborne gave oral evidence to the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on the subject of the "Governance of Artificial Intelligence".^[17] His testimony received significant coverage around his warnings of the threat of "rogue AI".^[18][19]

Honors

He is also an Official Fellow of Exeter College,^[20] a Fellow of the ELLIS society,^[21] and a Faculty Member of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance.^[22] He joined the Oxford Martin School as Lead Researcher on the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment in 2015.^[23] He is a Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems.^[24]