‘Godfathers of AI’ honored with Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computing

The 2018 Turing Award, known as the “Nobel Prize of computing,” has been given to a trio of researchers who laid the foundations for the current boom in artificial intelligence.

Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun — sometimes called the ‘godfathers of AI’ — have been recognized with the $1 million annual prize for their work developing the AI subfield of deep learning. 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.

In fact, you probably interacted with the descendants of Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun’s algorithms today — whether that was the facial recognition system that unlocked your phone, or the AI language model that suggested what to write in your last email.

All three have since taken up prominent places in the AI research ecosystem, straddling academia and industry. Hinton splits his time between Google and the University of Toronto; Bengio is a professor at the University of Montreal and started an AI company called Element AI; while LeCun is Facebook’s chief AI scientist and a professor at NYU.

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