It’s such a pleasure to welcome Phil Blunsom and Ed Grefenstette to Cohere to expand our presence across the Atlantic, to London. Phil joins Cohere as Chief Scientist, driving forward product-oriented research and innovation. Ed joins as Head of ML to lead both core ML teams and experimental projects.

London joins Cohere’s offices in Toronto and Palo Alto as our third major centre. London – and the UK more broadly – has long been a hub of machine learning innovation and I’m extremely excited to participate in and contribute to such a thriving community.

Phil joins to help Cohere shape the future of NLP research. With many years of experience at the forefront of innovation in NLP, his research groups at DeepMind and Oxford have pioneered deep learning advances in machine translation, question answering, and language modelling. Phil will continue his research and teaching as a Professor of Computer Science at Oxford University and a fellow of St Hugh’s College.

Ed joins as Head of Machine Learning to explore special projects aimed at expanding the functionality of Cohere’s platform. He brings a wealth of leadership experience and expertise in ML, having led initiatives across NLP, machine reasoning, grounded language acquisition, adaptive learning systems, and more at DeepMind and Facebook AI Research. Ed will remain Honorary Professor of Computer Science at University College London.

Cohere’s mission is to create machines that understand our world — and make them safely accessible to all. Phil and Ed’s experience driving forwards both fundamental and applied research spanning industrial and academic settings will be crucial to accelerating Cohere’s technical innovation and driving new capabilities on our platform. Phil and Ed embody an unparalleled dedication to — and ardour for — the field of Machine Learning. It is a privilege to welcome them to Cohere.

Aidan