Prof. Ruslan Salakhutdinov is the UPMC Professor of Computer Science in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He is one of the most influential researchers in modern deep learning, with foundational contributions to deep generative models, deep Boltzmann machines, and large-scale representation learning.
He previously served as Director of AI Research at Apple, where he led teams building machine learning capabilities into products used by hundreds of millions of people, and more recently as a VP of AI Research within Meta's SuperIntelligence efforts (Meta FAIR). His research bridges fundamental theory and large-scale applied systems across vision, language, and multimodal learning.
Prof. Salakhutdinov earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto under Geoffrey Hinton, where he was part of the group that helped catalyze the modern deep learning era. He has received numerous honors including the Sloan Research Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, Google Faculty Award, and Nvidia Pioneers of AI Award, and his work has been recognized with paper awards at leading venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, and CVPR.
