Jeremy Howard

Activities

historical

Jeremy Howard (b. 1973) is an Australian data scientist, entrepreneur, and educator. He studied philosophy at the University of Melbourne and spent the early portion of his career in management consulting (including roles at McKinsey & Co. and AT Kearney), where he helped build early “big data” practices.

He founded multiple startups in the 2000s and 2010s, including FastMail (an early, successful email provider) and Optimal Decisions Group (ODG), a company focused on optimization and pricing that was later sold. He was a top-ranked participant in data science competitions (Kaggle) around 2010–2011 and subsequently served as President & Chief Scientist of Kaggle.

In 2014 he founded Enlitic, a company applying deep learning to medical imaging and diagnostics, serving as CEO and public face of the company while it worked on using convolutional neural networks to improve diagnostic throughput and accuracy.

present

Howard is a founding researcher at fast.ai, the open research institute and education project he co-founded with Rachel Thomas. Through fast.ai he has focused on teaching practical deep learning (massive open courses), producing the fastai Python library, and publishing research designed to make state-of-the-art methods accessible to practitioners.

He remains active in public education and advocacy around AI (courses, talks, blog posts, interviews) and holds honorary/adjunct academic titles (for example, an honorary professorship at the University of Queensland). He also advises and mentors startups and has acted as a data strategist/advisor for venture groups.

Recent public-facing activity (2024–2025) includes talks and interviews on applied AI and tooling for reasoning/problem-solving (local YT resources reference a “SolveIt” / Answer.ai conversation and related appearances).

Connections to other people and organisations

• Rachel Thomas — co-founder of fast.ai and frequent collaborator on education and research.
• Kaggle community — former President & Chief Scientist and long-standing contributor to the competition community.
• Enlitic — founder and former CEO; connected to medical-imaging and health-tech networks.
• Academic contacts — Honorary Professor at University of Queensland and collaborator with many researchers in NLP and transfer learning.
• Investors and advisors — has worked with and advised venture firms (e.g., Khosla Ventures) and startups in AI/health-tech.

Notable contributions and research

• ULMFiT (Universal Language Model Fine-tuning) — Howard (with Sebastian Ruder) helped popularize fine-tuning pre-trained language models for downstream NLP tasks, an influential approach that predated and informed later transfer-learning techniques in large language models.
• fastai library and courses — practical, high-impact educational materials and tooling that lowered the barrier to entry for deep learning practitioners.
• Advocacy for applying ML to healthcare diagnostics — practical efforts at Enlitic to scale diagnostic capability and increase access to care globally.

Expectations for the future

Jeremy Howard’s public work has consistently emphasized democratizing AI: focusing on education, practical tooling, and applied research that enables more people and organisations to use machine learning effectively. It is reasonable to expect continued emphasis on:

• Practical education and accessible tooling for deep learning practitioners (fast.ai course and library development).
• Applied research in transfer learning, model fine-tuning, and methods that reduce the compute/data required for high performance.
• Continued advisory/mentorship roles with startups in AI and health-tech, and public-facing communication (talks, interviews) about responsible, impact-oriented AI.

Interests

Howard’s interests span deep learning research (particularly techniques that make models more transferable and accessible), teaching and pedagogy for technical audiences, applications of AI in healthcare, and building tools that accelerate practitioner productivity.

Sources

• fast.ai — people/profile pages and course materials
• ULMFiT (Howard & Ruder, 2018) — research on transfer learning for NLP
• Enlitic — company background and press
• Kaggle — competition history and Howard’s role as President & Chief Scientist
• Local resources in this knowledge base: /RESOURCES/YT-VIDEO/ (references to Jeremy Howard talks and 2025 appearances)
• Interviews, talks and articles (Wired, McKinsey Quarterly, TED and conference appearances)