Pushmeet Kohli, VP, Science and Strategic initiatives, Google Deepmind gave a talk on AI for advancing science on 17 February.

A Principal Scientist and Research Team Leader at DeepMind, Pushmeet Kohli is widely recognized for his contributions to Intelligent Systems and Computational Sciences. Prior to joining DeepMind, he served as Director of Research in the Cognition Group at Microsoft, where he spent a decade working across Microsoft Research labs in Seattle, Cambridge, and Bengaluru. During this time, he also served as Technical Advisor to Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s Chief Research Officer.

Pushmeet’s research spans Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Information Retrieval, and Game Theory. His current interests include 3D reconstruction and rendering, probabilistic programming, interpretable and verifiable knowledge representations from deep models, conversational agents for task completion, AI systems for healthcare, and immersive interaction technologies for augmented and virtual reality.

He has received numerous awards for his research. His PhD thesis, “Minimizing Dynamic and Higher Order Energy Functions using Graph Cuts,” won the British Machine Vision Association’s Sullivan Doctoral Thesis Award and was runner-up for the British Computer Society’s Distinguished Dissertation Award. His work has been presented at leading international venues including CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, SIGGRAPH, CHI, and others, earning multiple best paper and honorable mention awards.

Pushmeet is also part of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Speaker Program, and his research has been featured in prominent media outlets such as Forbes, Wired, BBC, New Scientist, and MIT Technology Review.

February2026