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James Bergstra is a Canadian-born artificial intelligence scientist, working as the Head of AI Research at Kindred, based in San Francisco, California. Bergstra co-founded the company, which creates artificial intelligence solutions that combine machine learning and robotics, and has previously served as the company's Chief Scientist and Chief Technology Officer (CTO).
Bergstra attended the University of Toronto - University of Trinity College from 2000 to 2004, where he achieved his Bachelor of Science, majoring in Math, Philosophy and Computer Science.
Bergstra later attended the Université de Montréal (University of Montreal), where he earned his Masters and Ph.D. in Computer Science. As a graduate student, he studied machine learning techniques for image and sound classification and deep learning of biologically inspired architectures. Bergstra wrote his Masters' dissertation on "Algorithms for Classifying Recorded Music by Genre", under Douglas Eck.
He would complete his Ph.D. under Yoshua Bengio, a renowned Canadian computer scientist who is noted for his work in artificial neural networks and deep learning. Bergstra's wrote his doctorate dissertation on, "Incorporating Complex Cells into Neural Networks for Pattern Classification", and was the first lead author of the Theano deep learning library.
Bergstra began working as a research scholar at Harvard University in June 2011. He researched biologically inspired vision algorithms, under the supervision of David Cox.
Bergstra returned to Canada academia as a Banting Fellow at the University of Waterloo, conducting post-doctoral research at the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience. Under Chris Eliasmith, Bergstra focused research on the intersection of machine learning, biological vision, reasoning and motor control.
Bergstra co-founded artificial intelligence and robotics company Kindred AI in July 2014. He started as Chief Scientist, working in that role until January 2017 when he took over as CTO of the company. Following fellow co-founder Suzanne Gildert's departure in January 2018, Bergstra rose to Head of AI Research.
Kindred raised $80 million in funding since its founding, and was purchased for $262 million by Ocado Group on November 2, 2020. Kindred's has combined robotics and machine learning to create automated sorting robots, that have been purchased and used in fulfillment centers for companies which include Gap, American Eagle Outfitters, and Kroger.
