Ian Goodfellow

Industry: A.I.

As one of the youngest and most respected A.I. researchers in the world, Ian Goodfellow has kept busy pushing the frontiers of deep learning. Having studied under some of the leading deep-learning practitioners like Yoshua Bengio and Andrew Ng, Goodfellow’s expertise involves neural networks, the A.I. software responsible for breakthroughs in computers learning how to recognize objects in photos and understanding language. Goodfellow’s creation of so-called generative adversarial networks (GANs) has enabled researchers to create realistic-looking but entirely computer-generated photos of people’s faces. Although his techniques have allowed the creation of controversial “deepfake” videos, they’ve also paved the way for advanced A.I. that can create more realistic sounding audio voices, among other tasks. Apple recently took notice of Goodfellow’s work and hired him to be the iPhone maker’s director of machine learning in the company’s special projects group. He was previously a star senior staff research scientist at Google and researcher at the high-profile nonprofit OpenAI.