Curtis Northcutt was born and raised in a rural area between Lexington and Athens, Kentucky. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather worked as mailmen and his mother worked minimum-wage jobs. After graduating valedictorian of Vanderbilt's College of Engineering in 2013, Curtis attended MIT, where he created a cheating detection system used by MITx and HarvardX MicroMasters courses and was awarded the MIT Masters Thesis Award (2017).
His PhD at MIT (2017-2021) focuses on AI algorithms to augment human intelligence. Curtis invented confident learning and the Python package 'cleanlab' for weak supervision and finding label errors in datasets. He has a decade of experience in AI and industry, including work with research groups at Google, Oculus, Facebook AI Research, Amazon, Microsoft Research, NASA, MIT, and Harvard, as well as prior startup experience as Chief AI Scientist with Knowledge AI.
