Hugo Larochelle

Biography

Hugo Larochelle is the Scientific Director of Mila, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence research institutes. With a community of close to 2,000 researchers and professionals, Mila has established itself as a pillar of the Canadian AI ecosystem with a reach that extends far beyond national borders.

As a pioneering researcher and industry leader, he has a unique perspective on both large-scale corporate research laboratories and Canada’s world-class academic AI community He built his academic foundation alongside two "Godfathers" of artificial intelligence: Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.

Over the years, his research has contributed several conceptual breakthroughs found in modern AI systems. His work on Denoising Autoencoders (DAE) identified the reconstruction of clean data from corrupted versions as a scalable paradigm for learning meaningful representations from large quantities of unlabeled data. Through models such as the Neural Autoregressive Distribution Estimator (NADE) and the Masked Autoencoder for Distribution Estimation (MADE), he helped popularize the neural autoregressive modeling paradigm now omnipresent in generative AI. Furthermore, his work on Zero-Data Learning of New Tasks introduced the now-standard concept of zero-shot learning.

He successfully bridged the gap between academia and industry by co-founding the startup Whetlab, which was acquired by Twitter in 2015. After a role at Twitter Cortex, he was recruited to lead Google's AI research lab in Montreal (Google Brain), now integrated into Google DeepMind. He remains an Adjunct Professor at the Université de Montréal and McGill University, and is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, mentoring the next generation of AI researchers.

Alongside his role as Scientific Director at Mila, he also serves as Scientific Lead at Adaption Labs and advises the startups Tiptree Systems and Prizmal.

A father of four, Hugo Larochelle and his wife, Angèle St-Pierre, have also made multiple donations to the Université de Montréal and Université de Sherbrooke, particularly in AI for environmental sustainability. He also founded the Techaide conference, mobilizing Montreal's tech community to raise funds for the charity Centraide in its mission to fight poverty and social exclusion.