PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Nicholas D. Lane

Also known as Nic Lane, Nicholas Lane

Nic Lane is a professor of machine learning systems at the University of Cambridge, where he leads the CaMLSys lab and works on machine learning for resource-constrained mobile devices and on decentralised AI. Research from his years as a Dartmouth doctoral student, who completed a thesis on mobile phone sensing in 2011, earned him and his co-authors ACM SenSys and ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time awards in 2018 and 2019, and he won the 2020 ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award. He directed the Samsung AI Center in Cambridge until March 2023 and was an associate professor at Oxford until May 2020. In 2020 he co-created the Flower federated learning framework with Daniel Beutel and Taner Topal, and in 2023 the trio set up Flower Labs, where he is Chief Scientific Officer. In 2024, a $20 million round led by Felicis Ventures valued Flower Labs at $100 million, and the Royal Academy of Engineering awarded him a £2.5 million Chair in Emerging Technologies for DANTE, a project on decentralised AI.

Now at
University of Cambridge and Flower Labs
Badges

Timeline

  1. 2011

    A Dartmouth thesis on phone sensing

    In 2011, he completes the thesis Community-guided Mobile Phone Sensing Systems in Andrew T. Campbell's group at Dartmouth College.

  2. 2018–2023

    Directing Samsung AI Cambridge

    He co-founds and heads the Samsung AI Center in Cambridge, a 50-person lab that starts in 2018, and personally directs its teams on distributed and on-device learning. He stays lab director until March 2023.

  3. 2018–2020

    Test-of-Time and Rockstar awards

    In 2018 and 2019, he and his co-authors receive the ACM SenSys and ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time awards for machine learning algorithms devised during his PhD thesis work. In 2020, he wins the ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award for work on how resource-constrained mobile devices understand and react to complex user behaviors, the first win by a professor from a university outside the United States.

  4. 2020

    Moving from Oxford to Cambridge

    After dual appointments at UCL and Nokia Bell Labs, where he is a Principal Scientist at Nokia, he is an Associate Professor in Oxford's Department of Computer Science until May 2020. At Cambridge, he is Professor of Machine Learning Systems and leads the CaMLSys lab.

  5. 2020

    The Flower framework

    With Daniel Beutel and Taner Topal, he co-creates the Flower federated learning framework at Cambridge as a research project in 2020. The 2020 paper Flower: A Friendly Federated Learning Research Framework, which he coauthors, presents a framework for large-scale federated learning experiments on heterogeneous edge devices.

  6. March 2023–February 2024

    Co-founding Flower Labs

    In March 2023, Beutel, Topal and Lane set up Flower Labs to maintain the framework and build developer tools for it, and Lane is its Chief Scientific Officer. A Y Combinator Winter 2023 company, it is valued at $100 million in February 2024 after a $20 million round led by Felicis Ventures.

  7. March 2024

    A Royal Academy of Engineering Chair

    In March 2024, he is one of three Cambridge researchers awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies, worth £2.5 million. His project DANTE aims to make AI development more democratic through methods that are less centralised, more collaborative and better at protecting privacy.

  8. As of October 2026

    Cambridge professor and Flower CSO

    He is Professor of Machine Learning Systems at the University of Cambridge, where he leads the CaMLSys lab, and holds a Chair at the Royal Academy of Engineering. He is also Chief Scientific Officer of Flower, a company building open-source frontier models, agents and infrastructure.

Career

  1. Since 2023Flower LabsChief Scientific Officer
  2. NowUniversity of CambridgeProfessor of Machine Learning Systems
  3. Until 2020University of OxfordAssociate Professor
  4. 2018–2023SamsungCo-founder, Director
  5. Bell LabsPrincipal Scientist

Education

  1. 2011Dartmouth CollegePhD

From the biography.

  1. 11% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduationIncludes Nicholas D. Lane. We estimate how often AI doctorate holders founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduation, how waiting times compare between founders and top jobs, and which universities trained the most.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes University of Cambridge. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  3. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes University of Cambridge. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  4. Companies supply the most prior-work hires at 7 of the 9 frontier AI labsIncludes University of Cambridge. Our estimates of the organizations where 550 people worked directly before joining 9 frontier AI labs across 620 career transitions, comparing the main feeder organizations per lab.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Nicholas D. Lane yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Students & Teaching | Andrew T. Campbell cs.dartmouth.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Andrew Campbell (computer scientist) - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Flower: Train AI on distributed data | Y Combinator ycombinator.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Professor Nic Lane - Networks of evidence and expertise for public policy admin-csap.csap.cam.ac.uk. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Director at Samsung AI Center Receives 2020 ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award – Samsung Global Newsroom news.samsung.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. The first AGI will be Federated - Talks.cam talks.cam.ac.uk. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. Nicholas Lane | Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford cs.ox.ac.uk. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. Professor Nic Lane - St John's College, Cambridge joh.cam.ac.uk. Checked 22 October 2026.
  9. AI startup Flower Labs, whose software allows AI models to be trained 'at the edge,' is valued at $100 million in new funding round | Fortune fortune.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  10. Flower: A Friendly Federated Learning Research Framework | arXiv arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  11. Three Cambridge researchers awarded Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies | University of Cambridge cam.ac.uk. Checked 22 October 2026.
  12. Prof. Nic Lane Awarded RAEng Chair in Emerging Technologies | CaMLSys mlsys.cst.cam.ac.uk. Checked 22 October 2026.
  13. Nic Lane - London Tech Week londontechweek.com. Checked 22 October 2026.