Company leader
Zachary Lipton
Co-founder and CTO
Abridge
Zachary Chase Lipton is co-founder and chief technology officer of Abridge, which writes the note from a doctor-patient conversation, and he teaches machine learning at Carnegie Mellon. He played jazz saxophone professionally before machine learning took over his doctorate.
Playing Jazz Saxophone
He was born on August 19, 1985, and is from New Rochelle, New York. He studied at Columbia University and became a working jazz saxophonist, and his 2007 album is First Steps. He is the grandson of Issachar Miron, who composed the song Tzena, Tzena, Tzena.
Switching to Machine Learning
In the first year of his PhD in computer science at the University of California, San Diego, he played saxophone four nights a week while taking classes. "There was this kind of huge explosion in interest for machine learning right around the same time as I was beginning my Ph.D.," he said. He worked on Amazon's recommendation engine and at Microsoft Research, and finished the PhD in 2017 under Charles Elkan and Julian McAuley.
Teaching at Carnegie Mellon
He is the Raj Reddy Associate Professor of Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University and runs the Approximately Correct Machine Intelligence lab, which studies algorithms that stay reliable when the data shifts. He is a co-author of Dive into Deep Learning, an open textbook written in Jupyter notebooks.
Co-founding Abridge
In 2018 he and Shiv Rao founded Abridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The company treats the conversation in the exam room as the source of the chart. He is its chief technology officer and chief scientific officer and leads the group that builds the product and the research behind it.