David Cox is the IBM Director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a first of its kind industry-academic collaboration between IBM and MIT, focused on fundamental research in artificial intelligence. The Lab was founded with a $240m, 10 year commitment from IBM and brings together researchers at IBM with faculty at MIT to tackle hard problems at the vanguard of AI.

Prior to joining IBM, David was the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences and of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he held appointments in Computer Science, the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Center for Brain Science. David's ongoing research is primarily focused on bringing insights from neuroscience into machine learning and computer vision research. His work has spanned a variety of disciplines, from imaging and electrophysiology experiments in living brains, to the development of machine learning and computer vision methods, to applied machine learning and high performance computing methods.

David is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and is an Agenda Contributor at the World Economic Forum. He has received a variety of honors, including the Richard and Susan Smith Foundation Award for Excellence in Biomedical Research, the Google Faculty Research Award in Computer Science, and the Roslyn Abramson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. He led the development of "The Fundamentals of Neuroscience" (http://fundamentalsofneuroscience.org) one of Harvard's first massive open online courses, which has drawn over 750,000 students from around the world.  His academic lab has spawned several startups across a range of industries, ranging from AI for healthcare to autonomous vehicles.