He’s a Goodfellow: one of Google’s top A.I. folks just joined Apple

Ian Goodfellow, one of the top minds in artificial intelligence at Google, has joined Apple in a director role, reports CNBC.

A Google spokesperson confirmed his departure. Goodfellow is the father of an AI approach known as general adversarial networks, or GANs. The approach draws on two networks, one known as a generative network and the other known as a discriminative network, and can be used to come up with unusual and creative outputs in the form of audio, video and text.

Goodfellow obtained his B.S. and M.S. in computer science from Stanford University and his Ph.D. in machine learning from the Université de Montréal. After graduation, he joined Google as part of the Google Brain research team. He left Google to join the newly founded OpenAI institute, but returned to Google Research in March 2017.

Goodfellow is best known for inventing generative adversarial networks, an approach to machine learning frequently used at Facebook. At Google, he developed a system enabling Google Maps to automatically transcribe addresses from photos taken by Street View cars and demonstrated security vulnerabilities of machine learning systems

In 2017, Goodfellow was cited in MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35. In 2019, he was included in Foreign Policy’s list of 100 Global Thinkers.

Goodfellow runs the Self-Organizing Conference on Machine Learning, which was founded at OpenAI in 2016. More information is available at www.iangoodfellow.com