BRIDGEPORT, Pa. — Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 1997 Second Team All-America goalkeeper Ryan Adams ’04 has advanced from Wellesley College women’s collegiate club head coach to a full Computer Science professorship at Princeton University as the former Engineer is now opening the minds of students in the classroom at an institution which he once ventured to shutdown in the water.
Adams, who anchored the Engineers’ cage with an All-America performance in 1997, served as the women’s collegiate club assistant coach at his alma mater in 1997 and 1998 prior to leading the Wellesley women’s club team as head coach form 1998-to-2000.
A 2004 graduate of MIT with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, he earned a Doctorate in Physics from the University of Cambridge courtesy a thesis on the Kernel methods for nonparametric Bayesian inference of probability densities and point processes in 2009.
The co-founder of Chief Executive Officer of Whetlab LLC (acquired by Twitter in June 2015) – which was developing artificial intelligence (A.I).-like technologies that made machine learning easier for companies to implement – Adams served as head of the Advanced Technology Group at Twitter from 2015-2016. From 2016-2018, he was a research scientist at Google Brain – a deep learning artificial intelligence research team dedicated to artificial intelligence which combined open-ended machine learning research with information systems and large-scale computing resources.
The recipient of a Gates Cambridge Scholarship (2004-2009), a United Kingdom Overseas Research Scholarship (2004-2009), a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Junior Fellowship (2009-2011), an Amazon AWS in Research Grant (2013-2014), a Samsung Electronics Grant (2013-2016), a Harvard/MIT Joint Research Grant in Basic Neuroscience (2014-2016), a Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain Research Award (2014-2017), an Adobe Research Gift (2015-16) and a National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Information and Intelligent Systems Grant (2014-2017). Adams earned a 2015 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship to “provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars”.
A prior Gates Cambridge Scholar (2004-2009, Cavendish Laboratory, Department of Physics, Cambridge University) and Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Junior Fellow (2009-2011, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto), he returned to Cambridge, Mass., for a five-year tenure as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University from 2011-2016.
Adams ventured south on I-95 in 2017 to assume the role of a Professor of Computer Science at Princeton.
A reviewer for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Neural Computation and the Journal of Machine Learning among other journals and publications, he served as an Associate Editor of Statistics and Computing (2013-2017) and IEEE Transactions of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2017-2018) and since 2017 holds the position of Action Editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR).
A presenter of invited talks and tutorials at Boston University, Harvard, Brown University, Duke University, Columbia University, Cornell University, the University of Washington, the University of Texas, the California Institute of Technology, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, he is the author of peer-reviewed articles in every major publication dealing with computer science.
