Ilya Feige

Ilya Feige has the raw technical horsepower of a world-class research scientist, which he has used to accumulate an incredibly rare leadership experience set. 

Ilya has led — both at the coal face and strategically — transformative work for Faculty, McKinsey, the NHS, and many other organisations. In terms of raw technical horsepower, Ilya was the overall top-ranked student in his undergraduate degree at McGill. 

However, he uses his technical authority to help organisations succeed at deeply leveraging one of the most transformational technologies of our time: AI.

Ilya graduated from McGill University in Montreal, Canada with a BSc Honours in Mathmateics and Physics, receiving the Governor General’s Award — single highest academic rank in class of 2010 (class of over 5,000 students). Ilya went onto become the single top PhD candidate in theoretical physics at Harvard University. 

Ilya joined Faculty in March 2017 and founded their AI research lab, creating a prestigious research network with Harvard and UCL in the process. Securing almost £1M in external funding grants for AI Safety programme, Ilya hired a world-class team and published over 10 papers, including a single-author paper at ICML, as well as papers in NeurIPS and ICLR.

Ilya subsequently went onto work with Faculty’s CEO during his next role as Head of Data Science, leading the core work to successfully pivot the business that propelled growth from £1m - £6m. Ilya led the most technically challenging projects, including the high-performance terrorist-propaganda-identifying system. 

In March 2020, Ilya was seconded to lead Faculty’s work with the NHS. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, the NHS culturally could not envisage how AI might be used to improve resource management. After a year of convincing stakeholders across a highly distributed organisation, the NHS are now monitoring and moving resources around the country off the back of the forecasting system Ilya’s team built with them.

This system is truly cutting edge (Bayesian hierarchical modelling with explainability from Ilya’s NeurIPS paper), but the real breakthrough is seen in the daily briefings run by NHS leadership where they go through forecasts, making critical operational decisions, with a fluency that would have been utterly incomprehensible just one year before.

Having returned to Faculty at the end of 2020 as UK Director of AI, Ilya leads the development team that is bringing Faculty’s AI strategy to market — a strategy that Ilya developed and convinced the broader company to adopt — and is the critical technologist in the room for every important sales conversations. 

Spanning research to product development to sales to delivery, Ilya is the person who can make AI real for organisations.