SAN FRANCISCO, March 28 — Yesterday, the Association for Computing Machinery awarded the prestigious Turing Award — named in honour of the mathematician who laid the foundation of computing — to three men often referred to as the godfathers of AI.
These three scientists, Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, Geoffrey Hinton of Google, and Yann LeCun, will be splitting a prize of US$1 million (RM4.08 million).
Specifically, these scientists earned the award by individually and together making “conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.”
Yoshua Bengio
Bengio, who is currently a professor at the University of Montreal and the Scientific Director at deep learning lab Mila, started revolutionising the world of computing back in the 1990s when he developed the first machine system that could read handwritten checks, and later, he significantly contributed to the development of AI that could translate languages and answer questions.
Most recently, his work with Ian Goodfellow on generative deep learning “spawned a revolution in computer vision and computer graphics” allowing for computers to create original images giving machines, for the first time, human-like abilities.
Geoffrey Hinton
Hinton wears many hats as a VP and Engineering Fellow of Google, Chief Scientific Adviser of The Vector Institute, and University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.
His most recent accomplishments include winning a competition he entered with some research students to develop software that identifies images; his team accomplished this with 85 per cent accuracy, a higher value than ever produced before.
Before this, he assisted in the creation of backpropagation algorithms which have significantly increased neural networks’ computing capabilities and are standard in most neural network systems today.
Yann LeCun
LeCun, like his colleagues, also began changing the computing world in the ‘80s when created convolutional neural networks and trained them on images of handwritten digits.
Today, this technology is applied to autonomous driving, medical image analysis, voice-activated assistants, and information filtering via use in computer vision, speech recognition, speech synthesis, image synthesis, and natural language processing. — AFP-Relaxnews
