Russ Salakhutdinov is co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Sooth Labs, UPMC Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, and president-elect of the ICML board. His research focuses on deep learning, probabilistic models and large-scale optimization. Previously, he was VP of Research at Meta and Director of AI Research at Apple, which acquired his startup Perceptual Machines. He taught at the University of Toronto after postdoctoral research at MIT. He earned his PhD and MS at Toronto and a bachelor's in computer science and mathematics at High Point University.