Joseph Gonzalez came to Berkeley in 2016 from Carnegie Mellon (2012) after creating a company that grew out of his thesis work. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrial Engineering and Computer Sciences.

“I believe we are still at the beginning of the AI-systems revolution and in the next five years, AI-systems research will transform our daily lives.”

Research Focus: Artificial intelligence (AI), database management systems. Leading expert in using machine learning to build systems to cope with massive amounts of data.

How is this work applied in the world? 

Google search, autonomous driving, social network analysis, and intelligent assistants like Amazon Alexa.

Why is this area important to you?  

Advances in artificial intelligence and scalable computer systems are changing the world. In my group, we are studying how the intersection of AI and systems can make autonomous driving safer and improve how we process visual and textual information, and how we can simplify the AI development process. I find this work rewarding both in the potential impact and in how it advances our understanding of the interplay between AI and systems research. This work reveals trade-offs in systems that shape the models we build and patterns in learning and inference that can be exploited in system design.  

Anything else you’d like to share? 

Before joining Berkeley, I was a co-founder of Turi Inc., a company that evolved from my thesis work on distributed graph processing systems for statistical inference. When I started my thesis work, neural networks were a small part of the AI world and there were only a few people interested in research at the intersection of AI and systems. By the time we ultimately sold Turi to Apple, my company, like the rest of the world, was working on systems for large-scale data processing and deep learning. In the timeframe of five years, AI-systems research grew from a nascent community to the driving force behind many of the modern advances in AI. Yet, I believe we are still at the beginning of the AI-systems revolution and in the next five years, AI-systems research will transform our daily lives.