Laurens van der Maaten

Laurens van der Maaten is a Senior Research Director at Meta AI (FAIR team). He leads a team of 130 world-leading AI researchers and engineers. Some of FAIR’s biggest AI breakthroughs, including the Cicero AI for the board game Diplomacy, the ESMFold model for single-sequence protein folding, and the LLaMa language model were developed under his leadership. At Meta, he developed the core image recognition technology that is used across the Facebook and Instagram products. Prior to joining Meta, Laurens worked as a faculty member at Delft University of Technology and as a post-doctoral researcher at University of California, San Diego.

Laurens has worked on a wide range of AI research topics, including image recognition, privacy in machine learning, large-scale learning from web data, and AI techniques for data visualization. Together with Geoffrey Hinton, he developed the t-SNE algorithm for data visualization, which has been the de facto standard in the field for over a decade. His publications have received over 95,000 citations and his h-index is 52. He received multiple awards for his research, including Best Paper Awards at the front-ranked IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) and the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). He routinely serves on the program committee of the field’s leading conferences, including Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).