doi.bio/oriol_vinyals

Oriol Vinyals

Early Life and Education

Oriol Vinyals (born 1983) is a Spanish machine learning researcher at DeepMind, where he is a principal research scientist. He was born in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, and studied mathematics and telecommunication engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. He then moved to the US and earned a Master's degree in computer science from the University of California, San Diego, and a PhD in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2013.

Career and Research

Vinyals is known for his contributions to machine learning and artificial intelligence. He co-invented the seq2seq model for machine translation along with Ilya Sutskever and Quoc Viet Le. At DeepMind, he led the AlphaStar research group, which focuses on applying AI to computer games such as StarCraft II.

Vinyals has also worked on the Google AI team, where he developed new techniques for language translation and image captioning. He was part of the Google Brain team before joining DeepMind and is currently a team lead of the Deep Learning group. His research has been featured in mainstream media outlets such as the New York Times, Financial Times, WIRED, and the BBC. He has authored numerous publications and received the 2016 MIT TR35 innovator award.

Notable Works

• Seq2Seq Model for Machine Translation: Vinyals co-invented the seq2seq model, which is used in Google Translate and has been cited over 70,000 times.
• Knowledge Distillation: This technique is used in Google's Text-To-Speech and Speech recognition systems, serving billions of queries daily.
• TensorFlow: Vinyals contributed to TensorFlow, which is used for training and deploying machine learning models across various domains.
• Smart Reply in Gmail: Vinyals and his team developed Smart Reply, which automatically suggests short replies to emails in Gmail.
• Image Captioning: He worked on technology that allows computers to accurately describe images, which is now incorporated into Google Image Search.