Ian Goodfellow


Ian J. Goodfellow is a researcher working in machine learning, currently employed at Apple Inc. as its director of machine learning in the Special Projects Group. He was previously employed as a research scientist at Google Brain. He has made several contributions to the field of deep learning.

Biography

Goodfellow obtained his B.S. and M.S. in computer science from Stanford University under the supervision of Andrew Ng, and his Ph.D. in machine learning from the Université de Montréal, under the supervision of Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville. After graduation, Goodfellow joined Google as part of the Google Brain research team. He then left Google to join the newly founded OpenAI institute. He returned to Google Research in March 2017.
Goodfellow is best known for inventing generative adversarial networks. He is also the lead author of the textbook Deep Learning. At Google, he developed a system enabling Google Maps to automatically transcribe addresses from photos taken by Street View cars and demonstrated security vulnerabilities of machine learning systems.
In 2017, Goodfellow was cited in MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35. In 2019, he was included in Foreign Policy's list of 100 Global Thinkers.
In 2019 Goodfellow left Google and joined Apple Inc. as director of machine learning.