Hugo Larochelle

I currently lead the Google Brain group in Montreal. My main area of expertise is deep learning. My previous work includes unsupervised pretraining with autoencoders, denoising autoencoders, visual attention-based classification, neural autoregressive distribution models. More broadly, I’m interested in applications of deep learning to generative modeling, reinforcement learning, meta-learning, natural language processing and computer vision.

Previously, I was Associate Professor at the Université de Sherbrooke (UdeS). I also co-founded Whetlab, which was acquired in 2015 by Twitter, where I then worked as a Research Scientist in the Twitter Cortex group. From 2009 to 2011, I was also a member of the machine learning group at the University of Toronto, as a postdoctoral fellow under the supervision of Geoffrey Hinton. I obtained my Ph.D. at the Université de Montréal, under the supervision of Yoshua Bengio.

My academic involvement includes member of the boards for the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) and for the International Conference on Learning Representations. I was program chair for ICLR 2015, 2016 and 2017, and program chair for the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference for 2018 and 2019.

Finally, I have a popular online course on deep learning and neural networks, freely accessible on YouTube.