April 30, 2025
Aaron Courville Appointed Scientific Director of IVADO
Montreal, April 30, 2025 – IVADO is pleased to announce the appointment of Aaron Courville as its new Scientific Director. A professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at Université de Montréal, Aaron Courville becomes IVADO’s second Scientific Director, succeeding Yoshua Bengio—one of the world’s pioneers in artificial intelligence (AI), architect of the R3AI vision, and recently named Special Advisor and Founding Scientific Director.
“We are extremely fortunate to welcome Aaron Courville into this key leadership role. His vision for the future of AI research, rooted in excellence, boldness, and responsible innovation, aligns perfectly with IVADO’s mission,” said Luc Vinet, Chief Executive Director of IVADO.
Ensuring Responsible and Ambitious Leadership
“The work carried out under the R3AI initiative holds great promise to significantly advance AI knowledge and its applications for the benefit of individuals. I look forward to working with our team to accelerate this essential work,” said Aaron Courville.
A Scientific Advisor to IVADO since 2022, Aaron Courville brings internationally recognized expertise and unwavering commitment to advancing AI technologies. As Scientific Director, he will be responsible for shaping IVADO’s strategic research vision, strengthening collaborations with industry and academic institutions, and fostering the emergence of bold interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral projects that will showcase IVADO’s scientific excellence on a global scale.
“My priority will be to ensure a strong connection between IVADO and the academic scientific communities,” Aaron Courville explained. “Artificial intelligence is an extremely fast-evolving field, with research frameworks constantly shifting. It is therefore essential to maintain a dynamic environment that supports collaboration and innovation, while exercising strong leadership on issues of ethics and interdisciplinarity.”
Pushing the Boundaries of Machine Learning: From Fundamental Research to Global Impact
Internationally recognized for his contributions to deep learning, Aaron Courville has dedicated his career to pushing the boundaries of machine learning. He is especially interested in reinforcement learning, deep generative models, and multimodal learning—with applications such as computer vision and natural language processing.
His work has laid the groundwork for major advances in fields like generative modeling and unsupervised learning, transforming the capabilities of AI systems.
Holding a PhD from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Aaron Courville is one of the early contributors to deep learning. He is a founding and principal member of Mila – the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, and co-author—with Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio—of the reference textbook Deep Learning. He also holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and a Canada Research Chair in Systematic Generalization. His research has been partially supported by Microsoft Research, Samsung, Hitachi, Sony (research fellowship), and Google (targeted research grant).
IVADO welcomes him into his new role and looks forward to drawing on his expertise to continue advancing research and innovation in support of the consortium’s R3AI vision.
