Russ Salakhutdinov

Ruslan Salakhutdinov is a Canadian researcher of Tatar origin specialising inartificial intelligence. He is currently the Vice President of Research in Generative AI atMeta, a position he has held since June 2024. In this role, his work focuses on multimodal large language models (LLMs) and AI agents. He also holds the position of UPMC Professor of Computer Science in the Machine Learning Department atCarnegie Mellon University, a role he has held since February 2016.

Salakhutdinov received his PhD in 2009 from theUniversity of Toronto,where his doctoral advisor was Geoffrey Hinton. His early research on deep belief networks made a significant impact in the field of deep learning. Following his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow atMIT. He later became an assistant professor at the University of Toronto from 2011 to 2016 before joining Carnegie Mellon.

Between 2016 and 2020, Salakhutdinov served as the Director of AI Research atApple. He co-founded Perceptual Machines, a company that was acquired by Apple in 2016. His research interests include deep learning, probabilistic graphical models, and large-scale optimisation.

Throughout his career, he has published numerous influential papers and contributed significantly to areas such asreinforcement learning,multimodal learning, andcontrastive learning. He has received several awards, including theAlfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, theNvidiaPioneers of AI award, and is a Senior Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR).

In addition to his research, he serves as an action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research and has been on senior programme committees for leading AI conferences like NeurIPS and ICML. Salakhutdinov's work continues to advance the field of machine learning and AI.