Biography:Douwe Kiela

From HandWiki

Douwe Kiela is a Dutch-American research scientist and entrepreneur working in the field of artificial intelligence with a focus on machine learning and natural language processing. He is the co-founder and CEO of Contextual AI,[1] an enterprise software company that provides a platform for building grounded AI agents for enterprise knowledge bases.[2][3]

He previously led the research team at Meta AI[4][5] that introduced the RAG approach in 2020,[6] co-authoring the foundational paper "Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks."[6][7] Kiela also served as Head of Research at Hugging Face[8] and is an adjunct professor in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University.[9]

Early life and education

Douwe Kiela was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 1986. He taught himself programming at a young age and showed an early interest in entrepreneurship. At the age of 18, he founded Brainstorm IT, a web application development company, before later pursuing an academic career in artificial intelligence.

He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences from Utrecht University, with a double major in Cognitive Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy.[10] He then obtained an MSc in Logic (cum laude) from the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC).[11] During his studies, Kiela worked as a Researcher and IT Consultant for the Royal Dutch Navy from 2004 to 2008.

Kiela received an MPhil and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, specializing in natural language processing and machine learning.[12] During his doctoral studies, he held internships at Microsoft Research in Cambridge and New York (2014-2015) and at IBM (2012).

Career

Facebook AI Research (Meta)

In 2016, Kiela joined Facebook AI Research (FAIR) as a postdoctoral researcher, later becoming a research scientist in New York. While at Meta, he co-authored papers in natural language processing,[13] with a focus on multimodal and grounded language learning. His projects included creating a virtual assistant bot[14] that could navigate tourists around a city[15][16] and leading the development of Dynabench,[17] an interactive benchmarking platform released in 2020 that used human feedback to test and improve language models.[18]

In 2020, Kiela led the Meta AI research team that introduced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), co-authoring the influential paper "Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks,"[6] alongside Patrick Lewis, Ethan Perez, and other researchers. The RAG framework transformed how large language models access and incorporate external information[19] by allowing them to retrieve relevant context from external knowledge bases at query time, rather than relying solely on pre-trained data.[20] This approach addressed key limitations such as hallucination, outdated information, and lack of source attribution.[21] The RAG technique has since become widely adopted in enterprise AI applications and knowledge-intensive natural language processing tasks.[22][23][24]

References

  1. ↑ Wiggers, Kyle (June 7, 2023). "Contextual AI launches from stealth to build enterprise-focused language models". https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/07/contextual-ai-launches-from-stealth-to-build-enterprise-focused-language-models/. 
  2. ↑ MacManus, Richard (May 28, 2025). "No, MCP Hasn’t Killed RAG — in Fact, They’re Complementary". https://thenewstack.io/no-mcp-hasnt-killed-rag-in-fact-theyre-complementary/. 
  3. ↑ Wolfberg, Elias (August 29, 2024). "From RAG to Richness: Startup Uplevels Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Enterprises". https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/contextual-ai-retrieval-augmented-generation/. 
  4. ↑ "Meta AI: People". 2016. https://ai.meta.com/people/277238188798234/douwe-kiela/. 
  5. ↑ Bradbury, Rosie (May 16, 2022). "The Meta AI mafia: Meet 12 artificial intelligence researchers and engineers who quit Meta for hot startups in everything from predictive medicine to careers". https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-engineers-and-specialists-who-quit-meta-to-launch-startups-2022-5. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Kiela, Douwe; Lewis, Patrick; Perez, Ethan; Piktus, Aleksandra; Petroni, Fabio; Karpukhin, Vladimir; Goyal, Naman; Küttler, Heinrich et al. (22 May 2020). "Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks". https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.11401. 
  7. ↑ Kiela, Douwe; Riedel, Sebastian; Lewis, Patrick; Piktus, Aleksandra (September 28, 2020). "Retrieval Augmented Generation: Streamlining the creation of intelligent natural language processing models". https://ai.meta.com/blog/retrieval-augmented-generation-streamlining-the-creation-of-intelligent-natural-language-processing-models/. 
  8. ↑ "Douwe Kiela. Hugging Face". 2022. https://huggingface.co/douwekiela. 
  9. ↑ "Stanford Profiles: Douwe Hendrik Kiela". 2022. https://profiles.stanford.edu/douwe-kiela. 
  10. ↑ "TWIML AI: Multimodal, Multi-Lingual NLP at Hugging Face". https://twimlai.com/network/douwe-kiela/. 
  11. ↑ "University of Amsterdam, MoL Thesis Archive". https://msclogic.illc.uva.nl/theses/archive/. 
  12. ↑ "Top AI Researcher on GPT 4.5, DeepSeek and Agentic RAG | Douwe Kiela, CEO, Contextual AI". March 6, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1QycrXdfeE. 
  13. ↑ Gur, Shir; Neverova, Natalia; Stauffer, Chris; Lim, Ser-Nam; Kiela, Douwe; Reiter, Austin (April 16, 2021). "Cross-Modal Retrieval Augmentation for Multi-Modal Classification". https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.08108. 
  14. ↑ Terdiman, Daniel (July 11, 2018). "Facebook taught bots to navigate New York City using natural language". https://www.fastcompany.com/90200229/facebook-taught-bots-to-navigate-new-york-city-using-natural-language. 
  15. ↑ Kiela, Douwe; de Vries, Harm; Shuster, Kurt; Batra, Dhruv; Parikh, Devi; Weston, Jason (July 9, 2018). "Talk the Walk: Navigating New York City through Grounded Dialogue". https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.03367. 
  16. ↑ Vincent, James (July 11, 2018). "Facebook sets a new task for AI: guide a virtual tourist around New York". https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/11/17560442/facebook-fair-ai-research-virtual-tourist-embodied-learning. 
  17. ↑ Wiggers, Kyle (September 24, 2020). "Facebook's Dynabench aims to make AI models more robust through distributed human workers". https://venturebeat.com/ai/facebooks-dynabench-aims-to-make-ai-models-more-robust-through-distributed-human-workers. 
  18. ↑ "Introducing Dynabench: Rethinking the way we benchmark AI". September 24, 2020. https://ai.meta.com/blog/dynabench-rethinking-ai-benchmarking/. 
  19. ↑ Leng, Quinn; Portes, Jacob; Havens, Sam; Zaharia, Matei; Carbin, Michael (November 5, 2024). "Long Context RAG Performance of Large Language Models". https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03538. 
  20. ↑ Singhal, Rahul (November 30, 2023). "The Power Of RAG: How Retrieval-Augmented Generation Enhances Generative AI". https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2023/11/30/the-power-of-rag-how-retrieval-augmented-generation-enhances-generative-ai/. 
  21. ↑ Shuster, Kurt; Poff, Spencer; Chen, Moya; Kiela, Douwe; Weston, Jason (April 15, 2021). "Retrieval Augmentation Reduces Hallucination in Conversation". https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.07567. 
  22. ↑ Lin, Belle (May 21, 2024). "How a Decades-Old Technology and a Paper From Meta Created an AI Industry Standard". https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-decades-old-technology-and-a-paper-from-meta-created-an-ai-industry-standard-354a810e. 
  23. ↑ Gao, Yunfan; Xiong, Yun; Gao, Xinyu; Jia, Kangxiang; Pan, Jinliu; Bi, Yuxi; Dai, Yi; Sun, Jiawei et al. (December 18, 2023). "Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey". https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.10997. 
  24. ↑ Brown, Andrew; Roman, Muhammad; Devereux, Barry (August 8, 2025). "A Systematic Literature Review of Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Techniques, Metrics, and Challenges". https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06401. 



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