Prominent AI researcher Ian Goodfellow receives Holst Memorial Lecture Award at TU Eindhoven

December 1, 2023

Ian Goodfellow, as this year's recipient of the Award, also gave the Holst Memorial Lecture in front of a sold-out Blauwe Zaal at TU/e.

Goodfellow received the award after his Holst lecture. Photo: Bart van Overbeeke

American Ian Goodfellow has received the Holst Memorial Lecture Award at TU Eindhoven. The Holst Memorial Award is a prestigious prize that has been awarded to an important researcher in technical science since 1977. Goodfellow is receiving the prestigious award for his research on artificial intelligence, particularly in the direction of generative AI, which consists of trained algorithms that can predict and generate text, images and audio, amongst other things. ChatGPT is by far the best known and most widely used generative AI tool.

Ian Goodfellow is currently lead researcher at Deepmind, a British artificial intelligence company that was acquired by Google in 2014. He first became involved in AI research at the Stanford Lab, working there as an undergraduate with leading AI professor Andrew Ng. Goodfellow earned his PhD in machine learning from the University of Montreal.

Watch the aftermovie of the Holst Memorial Lecture.

Diversity and inclusion in the AI industry

Goodfellow is also one of the inventors of so-called Generative Adversarial Networks, a framework that helped popularize generative models such as ChatGPT. He was also a researcher at Google and OpenAI, as well as director of Machine Learning at the Apple Special Project Group. The American has always been an advocate for responsible AI development, as well as diversity and inclusion in the AI industry.

Goodfellow is the youngest recipient ever of the award. He received the award after his Holst lecture from the hands of rector magnificus of TU/e Silvia Lenaerts. Lenaerts emphasized that generative AI is not only a technological story, but also sociological, ethical, and philosophical. Lenaerts: "It is an urgent topic that we need to talk, discuss and think about together. It raises important questions such as: ‘How can we use this technology to our advantage?’, ‘How can we best use generative AI so that we all benefit from it?’, and ‘What are the implications for our society?’"

Goodfellow received the award from rector magnificus of TU/e Silvia Lenaerts. Photo: Bart van Overbeeke

Goodfellow is pleased with the award. "I am proud and honored. I started doing AI to make the world a better place. It feels great that my work is being recognized and I am enjoying my visit to Eindhoven," said Goodfellow, who advised the students in the room to pursue multidisciplinary careers. "Think of a combination like AI and law or AI and medicine."

Holst Lecture since 1977

The Holst Lecture has been held annually since 1977 and is an initiative of Philips Research, Signify Research (since 2018), and TU Eindhoven. The lecture is named after Gilles Holst, founder of the Philips Physics Laboratory (Natlab). Well-known scientists and Nobel laureates such as Philippe de Gennes, Hendrik Casimir, Ilya Prigogine, Arno Penzias, Nicholas Negroponte, Alan Heeger, J. Craig Venter, and Shuji Nakamura preceded Goodfellow.