Anna Huang

Timeline

1. 2008

   Music and computer science

   She grows up in Hong Kong and learns to play the guzheng. After dual bachelor's degrees in computer science and music composition at the University of Southern California, she earns a master's degree at the MIT Media Lab in 2008. Her thesis, “Melodic Variations: Toward Cross-Cultural Transformation,” is supervised by Barry L. Vercoe in MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences.

2. 2016

   Magenta at Google Brain

   In 2016, she joins the Magenta team at Google Brain, which later becomes part of Google DeepMind. Her work brings together generative modeling, reinforcement learning and human-computer interaction to support partnerships between musicians and AI.

3. 2017

   Coconet for music composition

   In 2017, she coauthors “Counterpoint by Convolution” with Tim Cooijmans, Adam Roberts, Aaron Courville and Douglas Eck. They introduce Coconet, a convolutional neural network for generating polyphonic music, and use blocked Gibbs sampling to improve the quality of its output.

4. 2018

   Music Transformer

   She coauthors Music Transformer in 2018, applying self-attention to music generation. Its modified relative attention mechanism generates minute-long compositions, develops a supplied motif and creates accompaniments for melodies.

5. 2019

   A Harvard doctorate

   In 2019, she completes a computer science PhD at Harvard University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Her dissertation, “Deep Learning for Music Composition: Generation, Recommendation and Control,” examines how deep learning can support these three parts of the creative process.

6. 2019

   The Bach Doodle

   In 2019, she helps create the Bach Doodle, Google's first AI-powered Doodle, which uses Coconet to harmonize users' melodies in Bach's style. Coconet receives more than 55 million queries in three days.

7. 2021

   Canada CIFAR AI Chair

   In December 2021, she is named a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila, with affiliations at Google and Université de Montréal. From 2020 to 2022, she serves as a judge and then organizer for the AI Song Contest.

8. 2024

   Joining MIT

   In fall 2024, she joins MIT with a shared faculty appointment between Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Music and Theater Arts. Her research focuses on generative models and interfaces that support human-AI partnerships in music making.

9. 2025–2026

   A Radcliffe music fellowship

   In 2025–2026, she holds the Rieman and Baketel Fellowship for Music at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute. Her project explores multi-agent systems and environments for creativity through interaction with musicians and music ensembles.

10. As of October 2026

    Associate professor at MIT

    She becomes an associate professor without tenure in a shared appointment between MIT's Music and Theater Arts Section and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in September 2025. As of October 2026, she is the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor and directs the Human-AI Resonance lab at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). She also holds an adjunct professorship at Université de Montréal.