[Insights]CEO of Insitrio&Co-Founder of Coursera Daphne Koller's Perception of the Industry

Daphne Koller, a professor of computer science at 美国斯坦福大学 , co-founder of Coursera with Andrew Ng , and Founder and CEO of insitro , has devoted her career life in the field of #machinelearning , #biomedicine , and #edutech .?

Named as a MacArthur Fellow in 2004, being the first recipient of the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences, and elected as a member of the National Academy of engineering in 2011, Koller decided to leave academia and founded Coursera with Andrew Ng, a fellow Stanford computer science professor in the AI lab in 2012. Her contribution to online education was recognized and praised by the mass, and she was named TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2012.?

New Perception, New Changes

For most of her career, Koller has been working at the boundary of two disciplines: #machinelearning and #biomedicine. But until recently, machine learning has not had the same impact on biomedicine as it's had on so many other challenging domains. Koller realized that the reason for that is twofold: not enough high-quality, relevant data; and not enough "bilingual" people who can understand both domains and identify the important problems so as to design the "right" solutions. Thus, in 2018, she led insitro , a drug discovery startup, aiming to address both challenges, and an important societal problem: design novel, safe, and effective therapies that help more people, faster, and at a lower cost.?

How to Deal with Transitions?

Talking about her transition from the lab to industry, Koller emphasized that she appreciates finding the parallel between being a P.I. in academia and a leader in industry - creating a coherent and compelling narrative about 'why what you do matters’. At the same time, she advises the audience to be aware of something that cannot be deflected: while there is an obvious incentive to be a ‘lone wolf’ (you get more recognition as the first author of a paper) in academia, in industry the key is to be part of a team.

"Wish I've known these ealier..."

Koller reflected on her early experiences as an entrepreneur, sharing lessons she learned along the way that she wished she had known earlier. She emphasized the importance of having more experienced researchers on the start-up team and developing a company culture early on to set the company on the right path for the future.

Being a Leading Female Figure in the Industry

As a female founder, she shared the prevalence of microaggressions against women in the workplace and called on everyone to be part of the solution and speak out against this often unnoticed behavior, especially men. For young people in their careers, she encouraged them to trust their instincts and to focus on what matters.

Finally, Koller enthusiastically shared her insights at the intersection of bioscience and computer science, while talking about her ambitions for her company Insitro. She envisioned Insitro leading technological advances in the life sciences over the next 20 years, using the tools of machine learning and data science to enable it to intervene in the human body's biological systems. This shows great promise for applications in healthcare, energy, biomaterials, and more, waiting to be explored.

You can click on the link to watch the Decode Conference 2021 with Daphne Koller for additional information to learn more about the other topics she shares about.