Brendan Frey

Brendan John Frey FRSC^[1] (born 29 August 1968) is a Canadian-born entrepreneur, engineer and scientist. He is Founder and CEO of Deep Genomics,^[6] Cofounder of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence^[6] and Professor of Engineering and Medicine at the University of Toronto.^[7] Frey is a pioneer in the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence methods, their use in accurately determining the consequences of genetic mutations, and in designing medications that can slow, stop or reverse the progression of disease.^[1]

As far back as 1995, Frey co-invented one of the first deep learning methods, called the wake-sleep algorithm, the affinity propagation algorithm for clustering and data summarization, and the factor graph notation for probability models. In the late 1990s, Frey was a leading researcher in the areas of computer vision, speech recognition, and digital communications.

In 2002, a personal crisis led Frey to face the fact that there was a tragic gap between our ability to measure a patient's mutations and our ability to understand and treat the consequences. Recognizing that biology is too complex for humans to understand, that in the decades to come there would be an exponential growth in biology data, and that machine learning is the best technology we have for discovering relationships in large datasets, Frey set out to build machine learning systems that could accurately predict genome and cell biology.

Frey’s group pioneered much of the early work in the field and over the next 15 years published more papers in leading-edge journals than any other academic or industrial research lab.

In 2015, Frey founded Deep Genomics, with the goal of building a company that can produce effective and safe genetic medicines more rapidly and with a higher rate of success than was previously possible.^[8][9][10]

The company has received 240 million dollars in funding to date from leading Bay Area investors, including the backers of SpaceX and Tesla.^[11][12]