Tony Jebara

Tony Jebara is a leading expert in machine learning and artificial intelligence. He currently serves as vice president artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning at Spotify, where he oversees hundreds of engineers and scientists focused on personalization, including areas such as Home, Search, Voice, and user engagement. He also leads Spotify’s company-wide AI and machine learning strategy, helping to advance the platform’s capabilities and practices.

He is also a tenured professor (currently on sabbatical) in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, where he directed the Columbia Machine Learning Laboratory and chaired the Center on Foundations of Data Science.

Jebara was director of machine learning at Netflix, where he played a key role in improving the platform’s recommendation systems and overall personalization.

His academic work spans computer science and statistics, with research focused on learning from data in areas such as social networks, spatio-temporal modeling, computer vision, and natural language processing. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers and is the author of the book Machine Learning: Discriminative and Generative.

Jebara has received several prestigious awards, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, best paper honors from top machine learning conferences, and faculty awards from organizations such as Google, Yahoo, and IBM.

In addition to his academic and corporate leadership, he has co-founded and advised several startups in the AI space, including Sense Networks, Evidation Health, Agolo, Ufora, MagikEye, and Bookt.

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), earned in 2002.