Curtis NorthcuttFounder

United States - San Francisco, California

I am fortunate to work with a world-class team that inspires me every day. Try free no-code, automated Data Curation for LLMs, models, and analytics, built for teams and enterprises: https://cleanlab.ai

My companies and research contributions focus on:
• AI that works with noisy, human data
• AI to empower human intelligence, empathy, and capabilities

Bio (see curtisnorthcutt.com):
I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at MIT, where I was fortunate to work with Isaac Chuang. Before that, I was awarded the MIT Morris Joseph Levin Masters Thesis Award for my masters thesis work at MIT and the NSF Fellowship and TA'd graduate machine learning (6.867) at MIT. Before that, I graduated as valedictorian from Vanderbilt University (2009-2013) where I majored in math and CS and was awarded the Barry M. Goldwater National Scholarship.

My work spans the theory and applications of AI including uncertainty quantification and augmenting human capabilities. I invented confident learning and founded Cleanlab, a company that makes AI work for human data by automatically fixing noisy human datasets for machine learning pipelines. Before that, I created the CAMEO cheating detection system used to validate certificates in MITx and HarvardX online course teams. I am grateful to have worked at many of the world’s leading AI research groups, including Google AI, Oculus Research, Facebook AI Research, Amazon AI, Microsoft Research, NASA, MIT, and Harvard.

Growing up below the poverty line in rural Kentucky, I felt the glass ceiling of limited human and monetary resources. The ladder of opportunity often rises from prosperity rather than ability. My ladder was my education. Education led to exposure, summer programs, scholarships, and eventually opportunity. Everyone deserves access to quality educational resources – this underlies my motivation to pursue research that democratizes education and augments human learning and capabilities. This is why I spent my early years at MIT inventing the CAMEO cheating detection algorithm used to validate MITx and HarvardX certificates for open-access, free online courses, called MOOCs. And its why I founded ChipBrain, an Empathy AI startup to empower people with augmented empathy in conversation.