Godfathers of deep learning get turing award

Computers have become so smart during the past 20 years that we don’t think twice about chatting with digital assistants. But making those quantum leaps from science fiction to reality required the hard work from computer scientists like Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun. The trio made it possible for machines to learn like humans — artificial intelligence. Their insights and persistence were rewarded on Wednesday with the Turing Award, kown as Nobel Prize of computing. It comes with a $1-million prize funded by Google

Turing Award
AM Turing Award is named for Alan Mathison Turing, legendary British mathematician and pioneer of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. During Second World War, he was instrumental in breaking the German Enigma code, leading to Allied victory over Nazi Germany

Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton & Yoshua Bengio

Three scientists — called the ‘godfathers of AI’ for laying the foundations for many of the recent advances in AI— are being honored with this year award

Yann LeCun LeCun is the professor at New York University and the chief AI scientist at Facebook. His work in the early 90s introducing convolutional neural networks and advancing the notion of neural networks as being composed of modules that are differentiable is a key breakthrough in the space. His collaboration with Facebook colleague Léon Bottou is behind many of the advances in understanding artificial intelligence

Geoffrey Hinton
Hinton is the emeritus professor at Toronto University and a senior researcher at Alphabet’s Google Brain. He is often mentioned for his work in the original development of the backpropagation approach for neural network optimisation. His development of the Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) demonstrated the viability of multilayer neural networks in the 1980s. An RBM is a generative artificial neural network that can learn a probability distribution over its set of inputs Odds are even when even a famous skeptic of artificial neural networks won the price Marvin Minsky (1969)

Yoshua Bengio
Bengio is a professor at the University of Montreal as well as co-founder of AI company Element AI. Prof Bengio’s pioneering work in word embeddings was recognised as a major breakthrough in natural language processing (NLP). NLP is the ability of a computer program to understand human language as it is spoken