Simon Lacoste-Julien

Simon Lacoste-Julien is an Associate Professor at Université de Montréal, affiliated with the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO). He also serves as the Associate Scientific Director of Mila – Quebec Institute of Artificial Intelligence and holds the position of Vice President Lab Director at Samsung SAIT AI Lab Montreal (SAIL). His research focuses on machine learning, optimization, and their applications in areas like deep learning, generative models, causality, and computer vision. Lacoste-Julien has held academic positions at INRIA in Paris and has a PhD from UC Berkeley, with postdoctoral work at the University of Cambridge. He teaches advanced graduate courses on probabilistic graphical models and structured prediction. His work includes contributions to optimization algorithms (e.g., Frank-Wolfe methods), causal discovery, and generative models. Lacoste-Julien has supervised numerous students and postdocs, and his awards include being a CIFAR Fellow and Canada CIFAR AI Chair. His research spans theoretical foundations and practical applications, with a strong emphasis on scalable and efficient machine learning techniques.