PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Emily Morris

Emily Morris is a computer scientist whose AI work spans defeasible reasoning, speech, graph learning and environmental modelling. At the University of Cape Town, she competed for the Ketameme team in the 2019 CHPC Student Cluster Competition, where the team finished third, and worked on a 2021 honours project about defeasible explanations. Her Cambridge MPhil project in February 2023 compared MaxEnt methods with a CNN for Protea species using remote-sensing data. She coauthored research on graph neural network stability and multilingual language diarization in 2023, then coauthored a 2024 paper on CNNs for Protea distributions. As of October 2026, she is a DPhil candidate in Oxford’s Intelligent Earth CDT, a Canterbury Institute Middle Reader and is at Google; she holds computer science degrees from UCT and Cambridge, and her interests include AI applications to climate change and environmental risk.

Now at
Google and Canterbury Institute
Badges

Timeline

  1. 2019

    Third at the CHPC final

    In 2019, she competes for UCT’s Ketameme team in the CHPC Student Cluster Competition. The team finishes third in the national final.

  2. 2021

    Propositional defeasible explanation

    With Lloyd Everett, she works on UCT’s 2021 honours project Propositional Defeasible Explanation. It studies KLM propositional logic and proposes an algorithm that enumerates justifications for Rational Closure.

  3. February 2023

    CNNs for species distribution

    In February 2023, her Cambridge MPhil project compares MaxEnt techniques with a CNN for species-distribution modelling using remote-sensing data. The project focuses on Protea species and has supervisors Anil Madhavapeddy and David Coomes.

  4. August 2023

    A Graph Gram Index

    In August 2023, she coauthors a study of geometric instability in graph neural network embeddings. It proposes a Graph Gram Index to measure embedding instability on large graphs.

  5. December 2023

    Multilingual language diarization

    In December 2023, she coauthors a study of continuous multilingual language diarization using fine-tuned self-supervised WavLM representations. It tests code-switched speech in five South African languages and reports better diarization error rates than baseline systems.

  6. 2024

    CNNs model Protea distributions

    In 2024, she coauthors a paper that combines global remote-sensing imagery and CNNs for species-distribution modelling. It applies the method to Protea species in South Africa’s Cape Floristic Region and finds that the CNN models outperform Maxent.

  7. As of October 2026

    DPhil at Oxford and Canterbury

    As of October 2026, she is a DPhil student in Oxford’s Intelligent Earth CDT and a Middle Reader at the Canterbury Institute. She holds a BSc in computer science from UCT and an MPhil in computer science from Cambridge; her research interests include AI applications to climate change and environmental risk.

  8. As of October 2026

    At Google

    She is at Google as of October 2026 after time as a PhD student in Oxford’s Climate Modelling Research Group.

Career

  1. NowGoogle
  2. NowCanterbury InstituteMiddle Reader

Education

  1. From 2023University of CambridgeMPhil in computer science
  2. University of Cape TownBSc in computer science
  3. University of OxfordDPhil student

From the biography.

  1. 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a companyIncludes Emily Morris. We estimate that 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a company; 29% of moves starting at a university went to a company, and 76% ended the university role.
  2. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Google. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Emily Morris yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. UCT in top ten in national computing competition final news.uct.ac.za. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Propositional Defeasible Explanation showcase.sit.uct.ac.za. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Species distribution modelling using CNNs anil.recoil.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Geometric instability of graph neural networks on large graphs arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Fine-Tuned Self-Supervised Speech Representations for Language Diarization in Multilingual Code-Switched Speech arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Towards Scalable Deep Species Distribution Modelling using Global Remote Sensing climatechange.ai. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. Emily Morris | Intelligent Earth intelligent-earth.ox.ac.uk. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. Canterbury Institute canterbury.institute. Checked 22 October 2026.
  9. Climate Modelling Research Group climate-modelling.github.io. Checked 22 October 2026.