Distinguished Speaker Series: David Sontag

David Sontag is co-founder and CEO at Layer Health and a Professor at MIT in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and von Helmholtz Professor in the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES). He is also a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. Dr. Sontag’s research interests are in machine learning and artificial intelligence. As part of IMES, he leads a research group that aims to transform healthcare through the use of machine learning. Dr. Sontag joined MIT in 2017 from New York University, where he was Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Data Science from 2011 to 2016, and before this he was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England from 2010 to 2011. Dr. Sontag received the Sprowls award for outstanding doctoral thesis in Computer Science at MIT in 2010, best paper awards at the conferences Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), and Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), faculty awards from Google, Facebook, and Adobe, and a NSF CAREER Award. Dr. Sontag received a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.