Ruslan Salakhutdinov (Russian: Руслан Салахутдинов; born c. 1980) is a Canadian researcher of Tatar origin working in the field of artificial intelligence.

He specializes in deep learning, probabilistic graphical models, and large-scale optimization.

[2] Salakhutdinov was considering quitting the field of artificial intelligence when he met Hinton in 2004, but changed his mind after Hinton asked him to take part in a project focused on a new way to train artificial neural networks, which he dubbed "deep belief networks."

[6] Salakhutdinov joined Apple as its director of AI research in 2016 but left in 2020 to return to Carnegie Mellon University.

[1][7][8] In June 2023, Salakhutdinov joined Felix Smart which is a company that uses AI to take care for plants and animals as Board Director.