Ruslan Salakhutdinov is a UPMC Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Toronto in 2009. After spending two post-doctoral years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Lab, he joined the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Statistics and Computer Science. In 2016 he joined CMU. Ruslan's primary interests lie in deep learning, machine learning, and large-scale optimization. He is an action editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research and served on the senior programme committee of several top-tier learning conferences including Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) and International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). He is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow, Canada Research Chair in Statistical Machine Learning, a recipient of the Early Researcher Award, Google Faculty Award, Nvidia's Pioneers of AI award, and is a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.