Godfathers of AI Win the Turing Award
Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun are $1 million richer thanks to winning the 2018 Turing Award which is often described as "the Nobel Prize of computing".
The trio are known as the 'godfathers of AI' for their work developing the subfield of AI known as deep learning.
According to the Association for Computing Machinery, which announced the award the trio's engineering breakthroughs (made independently and sometimes, together) transformed deep learning into "a critical component of computing".
In an interview with BBC News, Professor Hinton explained that all three pursued deep learning even when it had not been fashionable to do so.
"I think it's great that the computer science community has recognized that this stuff is not flaky," he said.
"For many years, they thought that neural nets were not respectable.
"I think we're just at the beginning of a big revolution."
Achievements
The trio’s achievements have been widely praised by many in the field, including Jeff Dean, Google’s head of AI. “Deep neural networks are responsible for some of the greatest advances in modern computer science,” said Dean in a statement. “At the heart of this progress are fundamental techniques developed by this year’s Turing Award winners, Yoshua Bengio, Geoff Hinton, and Yann LeCun.”
Among the many highlight's of the trio's work in artificial intelligence are:
- Demonstrating that neural nets could achieve excellent results on takes such as character recognition.
- Developing conceptual foundations for the field.
Click here to learn more about the three Turing Award winners and their achievements.
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