Alex Graves (computer scientist)

Alex Graves is a research scientist at DeepMind. He did a BSc in Theoretical Physics at Edinburgh and obtained a PhD in AI under Jürgen Schmidhuber at IDSIA. He was also a postdoc at TU Munich and under Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto.

At IDSIA, he trained long short-term memory neural networks by a novel method called connectionist temporal classification (CTC). This method outperformed traditional speech recognition models in certain applications. In 2009, his CTC-trained LSTM was the first recurrent neural network to win pattern recognition contests, winning several competitions in connected handwriting recognition. This method has become very popular. Google uses CTC-trained LSTM for speech recognition on the smartphone.

Graves is also the creator of neural Turing machines and of the closely related differentiable neural computer.