The three took the 1-million prize for laying the foundation of deep learning, which has become a staple in autonomous vehicles, computer vision, and speech recognition. (Image credit: ACM)
The ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) has given the Turing Award (the Nobel Prize of computing) to a trio of scientists- Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun, for their work in AI, more specifically, deep learning. The three won a $1-million prize for developing the foundations during the 1990s and 2000s that led to breakthroughs in areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, and a host of others.
All three worked independently and together to continue the development of artificial neural networks as a tool for computers to learn to recognize patterns and replicate human intelligence. In the early 2000s, their efforts were met with a good amount of skepticism, but that apprehension eventually disappeared and resulted in the technological advancements in AI applications, and their methodology is the current driving force within the field.
According to ACM President Cherri M. Pancake, “Artificial intelligence is now one of the fastest-growing areas in all of science and one of the most talked-about topics in society. The growth of and interest in AI is due, in no small part, to the recent advances in deep learning for which Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun laid the foundation. These technologies are used by billions of people. Anyone who has a smartphone in their pocket can tangibly experience advances in natural language processing and computer vision that were not possible just ten years ago. In addition to the products we use every day, new advances in deep learning have given scientists powerful new tools—in areas ranging from medicine, to astronomy, to materials science.”
All three have taken prominent positions at various institutions with Benjio splitting his time as a professor at the University of Montreal and as the scientific director at Mila (Quebec’s AI institute). Hinton is VP and Engineering Fellow at Google, Chief Scientific Advisor at the Vector Institute, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. LeCun is a professor at New York University, as well as Chief AI Scientist at Facebook. A list of their many accomplishments can be viewed on ACMs press release, and the Association will formally recognize the winners at the 2018 Turing Awards at their annual banquet on June 15 in San Francisco.
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