Hugo Larochelle
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Hugo Larochelle | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1981 (age 44–45) |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Alma mater | Université de Sherbrooke |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Twitter, Google, Mila, Université de Montréal |
| Thesis | Études de techniques d'appentissage non-supervisé pour l'amélioration de l'entraînement supervisé de modèles connexionnistes (2008) |
| Doctoral advisor | Yoshua Bengio |
| Website | mila |
Hugo Larochelle is a Canadian computer scientist specializing in machine learning and deep learning.[1] He has held positions in both industry and academia, having served as a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind in Montreal, and currently serving as an Adjunct Professor at the Université de Montréal, a Core Industry Member at Mila – Québec AI Institute, and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair.
He co-founded Whetlab, a startup which was acquired by Twitter in 2015.
Education
Hugo Larochelle pursued his entire university education at the Université de Montréal. He earned a BSc degree in Mathematics and Computer Science in 2004 and a PhD in Computer Science in 2009.[2]
His doctoral research was conducted under the supervision of Turing Award laureate Yoshua Bengio. His thesis was titled "Études de techniques d'apprentissage non-supervisé pour l'amélioration de l'entraînement supervisé de modèles connexionnistes" (Studies of unsupervised learning techniques for improving supervised training of connectionist models).
From 2009 to 2011, Larochelle completed postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Geoffrey Hinton.[3]
Career
In 2011, Larochelle was hired as Assistant Professor at the Département d'informatique (Department of Computer Science) at the Université de Sherbrooke in Québec.[4] He is an Adjunct Professor at Université de Montréal since 2017. He is a Core Industry Member at Mila – Québec AI Institute, and holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair.[5][6]
Whetlab and Twitter
While at Université de Sherbrooke, Larochelle co-founded Whetlab around 2014. The startup originated from research conducted with collaborators Jasper Snoek, Kevin Swersky, Ryan P. Adams, and Alex Wiltschko, focusing on practical Bayesian optimization techniques to automate the tuning of hyperparameters for machine learning algorithms. Whetlab was acquired by Twitter in June 2015.[7] Following the acquisition Larochelle joined Twitter, working as a Research Scientist in the Twitter Cortex group.[8]
Google Brain and Google DeepMind
In 2016, Larochelle moved to Google to establish and lead the new Google Brain research group in Montreal.[9]
In April 2023, Google Brain merged with DeepMind, a sister company also owned by Google's parent Alphabet Inc., to form Google DeepMind. Larochelle worked as a Principal Scientist within the unified Google DeepMind organization in Montreal until April 2025.
Academic contributions
Larochelle is a co-founder and served as a founding Editor-in-Chief (alongside Raia Hadsell and Kyunghyun Cho) of Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), a journal launched in 2022 under the umbrella of the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR).[10]
He serves on the boards of the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) and the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).[11][12]
Larochelle created a comprehensive online course covering neural networks and deep learning, based on lectures he delivered at Université de Sherbrooke.[13]
Philanthropy
Hugo Larochelle and his wife Angèle St-Pierre have made philanthropic contributions to education and research. In 2019, the Fonds Angèle St-Pierre et Hugo Larochelle announced the bequest of a life insurance policy valued at over $800,000 to the Université de Sherbrooke to support the department of computer science.[4] In 2022, Larochelle and St-Pierre announced a $1 million donation to Université de Montréal.[14] This donation funds PhD scholarships for students conducting research on the application of artificial intelligence to environmental problems, such as combating climate change or biodiversity decline. They made a further donation of $1.25 million to Université de Montréal in 2024.[15]
References
- ↑ "Google Scholar". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2025-06-30.
- ↑ Benessaieh, Karim (2024-09-11). "Entrevue avec Hugo Larochelle, de Google DeepMind: Plus d'intelligence pour plus de solutions". La Presse (in français). Retrieved 2025-06-30.
- ↑ "Geoffrey Hinton's postdocs". www.cs.toronto.edu. Retrieved 2025-06-30.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Hugo Larochelle : une étoile montante en intelligence artificielle redonne à l'UdeS". Université de Sherbrooke. 8 February 2019. Retrieved 30 June 2025.
- ↑ "Hugo Larochelle | Mila". mila.quebec. Retrieved 2025-06-30.
- ↑ "Hugo Larochelle". CIFAR. Retrieved 30 June 2025.
- ↑ "Twitter buys Whetlab, artificial intelligence and machine learning startup | University of Toronto". www.utoronto.ca. Retrieved 2025-04-10.
- ↑ Perez, Sarah (2015-06-17). "Twitter Acquires Machine Learning Startup Whetlab". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2025-06-30.
- ↑ Etherington, Darrell (2016-11-21). "Google opens new AI lab and invests $3.4M in Montreal-based AI research". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2025-04-11.
- ↑ "Transactions on Machine Learning Research". jmlr.csail.mit.edu. Retrieved 2025-04-10.
- ↑ "ICML 2025 Board". icml.cc. Retrieved 2025-06-30.
- ↑ "2024 Board". neurips.cc. Retrieved 2025-06-30.
- ↑ "Neural networks class - Université de Sherbrooke". YouTube. Retrieved 2025-04-10.
- ↑ Benessaieh, Karim (2022-12-20). "Don à l'Université de Montréal: Un million pour combiner IA et environnement". La Presse (in français). Retrieved 2025-04-10.
- ↑ Bouvette, Mariane (October 23, 2024). "Un don de 1,25 M$ pour attirer les talents en IA et environnement". UdeM Nouvelles. Retrieved April 10, 2025.
External links
This article "Hugo Larochelle" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical. Articles taken from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be accessed on Wikipedia's Draft Namespace.