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

Goodfellow received the award after his Holst lecture.

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 engineering science since 1977. Goodfellow is receiving the prestigious award for his research on artificial intelligence, particularly towards generative AI. Generative AI consists of trained algorithms that can predict and generate text, images and audio, among other things. ChatGPT is by far the best-known and most widely used generative AI tool.

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

Diversity and inclusion in the AI industry
Goodfellow is also one of the inventors of the 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 championed responsible AI development and diversity and inclusion in the AI industry.

Goodfellow is the youngest ever recipient of the award. He received the award after his Holst lecture from rector magnificus of TU/e Silvia Lenaerts. Lenaerts emphasised 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? But also, what are the implications for our society?"



Goodfellow received the award from rector magnificus of TU/e Silvia Lenaerts.

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

Holstlezing since 1977
The Holstlezing 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.

photos: Bart van Overbeeke
source: TU/e news

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