Aaron Courville

Scientific Director

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.

He holds a Ph.D. from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at Université de Montréal. He is also a founding member and principal investigator at Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. In addition, he holds a Canada Research Chair in Systematic Generalization and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, and is a fellow in CIFAR’s Learning in Machines & Brains program. His research has been partially supported by Microsoft Research, Samsung, Hitachi, Sony (research fellowship), and Google (targeted research grant).

As co-author, alongside Ian Goodfellow and Yoshua Bengio, of the seminal textbook on Deep Learning, he has played a key role in establishing the foundations of the field. His research, supported notably by Microsoft Research, Samsung, Hitachi, Sony, and Google, has led to significant advances in unsupervised learning and deep generative models.

He has held the position of Scientific Director at IVADO since April 2025, where he brings cutting-edge expertise in Machine Learning to support the consortium’s scientific initiatives.