The 2018 Turing Award was honoured to three-computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun – are called the ‘godfathers of AI’. The award recognized with the 1 million annual prizes for their work in developing the deep learning of Artificial Intelligence.
Turing award often referred to as the ‘Nobel Prize of Computing,’ the award is named after Alan Mathison Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing. Turing was also instrumental in British code-breaking work during World War II.
The techniques the trio developed in the 1990s and 2000s enabled huge breakthroughs in tasks like computer vision and speech recognition. Their work underpins the current proliferation of AI technologies, from self-driving cars to automated medical diagnoses.
Deep learning methods are used in computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, robotics, and other applications. Behind all such techniques, the algorithm developed by them is the fundamental formula for all such innovation.
Who are these Trio?
Geoffrey Hinton is currently the vice president and a senior researcher at Alphabet Inc.’s Google Brain, chief scientific adviser of the Vector Institute and a professor at the University of Toronto. He co-invented Boltzmann machines.
Yann LeCun designed a neural network that could read handwritten letters and numbers. He is a vice president and chief AI scientist at Facebook and a professor at New York University. Bengio and LeCun are also co-directors of CIFAR’s Learning in Machines and Brains program.
Yoshua Bengio is a professor at the University of Montreal and the science director of both Mila (Quebec’s AI Institute) and the Institute for Data Valorization. His methods to apply deep learning to sequences, such as speech, and understanding text.
