Lukas Biewald | |
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Born | 1981 (age 42–43) |
Alma mater | Stanford University |
Lukas Biewald (born 1981 in Massachusetts) is an entrepreneur living in San Francisco, California. Biewald was the co-founder and CEO of Figure Eight Inc. (formerly CrowdFlower) which he co-founded in December 2007 with Chris Van Pelt.[1] In 2019, Biewald sold Figure Eight to Appen for 300 million dollars.[2]
In 2018, Biewald co-founded Weights & Biases, an AI developer platform that creates developer tools for machine learning,[3] with Chris Van Pelt and Shawn Lewis.[4] He is also the host of Gradient Dissent, a machine learning podcast.
As a child, Biewald was a fan of watching PBS science documentaries. He was drawn in and fascinated by the potential of AI and its ability to create and replicate human behavior with technology. In an interview, he noted: "The idea that computers could learn to do things on their own just seemed amazing to me. It always kind of felt like humanity’s last project."[5]
Biewald holds a B.S. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.[6] He was also a research assistant in Daphne Koller's group in the Stanford AI Lab.
Prior to co-founding Figure Eight, Biewald was a Senior Scientist and Manager within the Ranking and Management Team at Powerset, a natural language search technology company later acquired by Microsoft.
From 2005 to 2006, Biewald led the Search Relevance Team for Yahoo! Japan, where he focused on using statistical machine learning approaches to improve the web search ranking function for international markets.
Biewald holds an MS in Computer Science and a BS in Mathematics from Stanford University.
While pursuing his Master's in Computer Science at Stanford University, Biewald won the California Institute of Technology Turing Tournament.[11]
He is the author of several academic papers[12][13][14] on applications of crowdsourcing, as well as a chapter on crowdsourcing gender and age stereotypes[15] in O'Reilly Media's Beautiful Data that he co-authored with Brendan O'Connor.
Biewald appeared in an episode of Hidden in Plain Sight entitled "Deep Learning is Eating the World",[16] where he discussed software evolution and the effect of machine learning on humanity.