Ian J. Goodfellow (born 1987[1]) is an American computer scientist, engineer, and executive, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning.

He is a research scientist at Google DeepMind,[2] was previously employed as a research scientist at Google Brain and director of machine learning at Apple as well as one of the first employees at OpenAI, and has made several important contributions to the field of deep learning, including the invention of the generative adversarial network (GAN).

Goodfellow co-wrote, as the first author, the textbook Deep Learning (2016)[3] and wrote the chapter on deep learning in the authoritative textbook of the field of artificial intelligence, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach[4][5] (used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries).

in computer science from Stanford University under the supervision of Andrew Ng (co-founder and head of Google Brain),[citation needed] and his Ph.D. in machine learning from the Université de Montréal in February 2015, under the supervision of Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville.

[7][8] Goodfellow's thesis is titled Deep learning of representations and its application to computer vision.