Qualifications

BSc Mathematics and Computer Science (Open University of Israel); MSc Computer Science with focus on Machine Learning (University of Oxford); PhD Information Engineering (Machine Learning Group, University of Cambridge)

Academic background

Prior to my move to Oxford I was a Research Fellow in Computer Science at St Catharine's College at the University of Cambridge. I obtained my PhD from the Cambridge machine learning group, working with Prof Zoubin Ghahramani and funded by the Google Europe Doctoral Fellowship. Prior to that I studied at Oxford Computer Science department for a Master's degree under the supervision of Prof Phil Blunsom. Before my MSc I worked as a software engineer for 3 years at IDesia Biometrics developing code and UI for mobile platforms, and did my undergraduate in mathematics and computer science at the Open University in Israel.

Undergraduate teaching

I tutor undergraduates in Computer Science at Christ Church.

Research interests

Fields I have published work in include: Bayesian deep learning • deep learning • approximate Bayesian inference • Gaussian processes • Bayesian modelling • Bayesian non-parametrics • scalable MCMC • generative modelling. 
With applications including AI safety • ML interpretability • reinforcement learning • active learning • natural language processing • computer vision • medical analysis.

Featured publications

A full list of my publications can be found here.

Featured News

COLLEGE |

Could machine learning models cause their own collapse?

AI systems have shown remarkable advances in recent years, but an article published today in Nature highlights a potential stumbling block on the horizon for them. The paper’s authors, who include Christ Church’s Dr Ilia Shumailov and Professor Yarin Gal, set out how the ‘indiscriminate’ training of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT and Gemini on model-generated data ‘causes irreversible defects in the resulting models’ – giving rise to a phenomenon the researchers term ‘model collapse’. 

Dr Ilia Shumailov and Professor Yarin Gal
COLLEGE |

AI ‘hallucination’ research led by Yarin Gal and team appears in Nature

An article by Professor Yarin Gal, Tutor in Computer Science at Christ Church, and members of his Oxford Applied and Theoretical Machine Learning Group (OATML) has been published today in Nature. The research of Professor Gal, Dr Sebastian Farquhar, Jannik Kossen and Lorenz Kuhn proposes a means of predicting when large language model (LLM) systems such as ChatGPT and Gemini are likely to ‘hallucinate’ – that is, invent intuitively plausible but wholly imaginary facts. 

Professor Yarin Gal