Richard Zemel is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he has been a faculty member since 2000. Before that, he was an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Psychology at the University of Arizona and a Postdoctoral Fellow at both the Salk Institute and Carnegie Mellon University. His research contributions include foundational work on systems that learn useful representations of data without any supervision, methods for learning to rank and recommend items, and machine learning systems for automatic captioning and answering questions regarding images. Zemel holds B.Sc. degrees in history and science from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Toronto. He is also a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and serves on the Executive Board of the Neural Information Processing Society, which organizes the premier international machine learning conference.