Richard Socher (born 1982 or 83) is a computer scientist focusing on AI research. He co-created ImageNet, a visual database, and GloVe, an unsupervised learning algorithm which embeds words in multi-dimensional vectors.
In 2009, a team of researchers, including Socher, developed ImageNet, a large visual database designed for use in visual object recognition software research. The database hand-annotates images to indicate what objects are pictured and in at least one million of the images, bounding boxes are also provided. ImageNet contains more than 20,000 categories, with a typical category, such as "balloon" or "strawberry", consisting of several hundred images. The database of annotations of third-party image URLs is freely available directly from ImageNet, though the actual images are not owned by ImageNet.
In 2014, Socher completed a PhD at Stanford University. In the same year, three co-authors, including Socher, launched GloVe, an open-source, unsupervised learning algorithm that embeds words in multi-dimensional vectors. GloVe sought to compete with Word2Vec. Socher and co-authors argued that âÂÂ[f]or the same corpus, vocabulary, window size, and training time, GloVe consistently outperforms word2vecâÂÂ. Later, Transformer-based models, such as BERT, have improved upon the GloVe model.
In 2021, Socher founded You.com, an artificial intelligence startup. He was formerly the CEO of Salesforce, an AI and software company subsequently acquired by Salesforce. Socher has also lectured as an adjunct professor at Stanford.