Robert Monarch (formerly Robert Munro) leads engineering teams at Apple focused on tasks including: machine learning; annotation; anti-fraud; and privacy-preserving architectures for new products.

Robert is also the instructor for the Deeplearning.ai courses on AI and Public Health, Climate Change, and Disaster Management.

Previously, he has worked in Sierra Leone, Haiti, the Amazon, London, and Sydney, in organizations ranging from startups to the United Nations. This includes work as the CEO and founder of Idibon, the CTO at Figure Eight, and leading AWS's first Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation services, Amazon Comprehend and Amazon Translate.

Robert is the author of Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning, covering practical methods for Active Learning, Transfer Learning, and Annotation.

All author proceeds from the book are donated to initiatives for better datasets, especially for low-resource languages and for health and disaster response.

Robert runs Bay Area NLP, the world's largest community of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Speech, and Information Retrieval professionals.

Before moving to Silicon Valley, Robert worked in post-conflict development in Sierra Leone and Liberia. He saw that while everyone in the refugee camps he was working in had access to a cellphone, the machine learning applications on those phones only worked in a handful of languages. This motivated Robert to complete a PhD at Stanford focused on adapting machine learning to low resource languages for healthcare and disaster response.

Robert has continued to work in ways to mindfully bring new technologies to disaster response and public health situations. This includes: managing crowdsourced translation by finding 2,000 people from the Haitian diaspora to translate, categorize, and map emergency text messages sent in Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake; using AI in partnership with epidemiologists and virologists to identify potential global disease outbreaks; running aerial damage assessments following Hurricane Sandy in the USA; helping local health and international aid organizations during the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone; and working with many organizations worldwide responding to COVID-19.