- Three computer scientists who laid the foundations for many of the recent advances in artificial intelligence are being honored with Turing Award 2019, considered the field’s highest accolade.
- Geoff Hinton, an emeritus professor at the University of Toronto and a senior researcher at Alphabet Inc.’s Google Brain, Yann LeCun, a professor at New York University and the chief AI scientist at Facebook Inc., and Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal as well as co-founder of AI company Element AI Inc., will share this year’s award, which is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery.
- Past winners of the award, sometimes called the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” have included Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the world wide web, and Whitfield Diffie, who helped pioneer public-key cryptography.
- This year’s three winners are often referred to collectively as the “Godfathers of Deep Learning” for their research into neural networks — a kind of machine-learning software that loosely mimics the way the human brain works.
- In 1983 Hinton co-invented Boltzmann machines, one of the first types of neural networks to use statistical probabilities. Three years later, he co-authored a seminal paper demonstrating that a technique for updating the strength of the connections within a neural network, known as backpropagation, could imbue this software with remarkable learning capabilities.
- LeCun, who did postdoctoral work under Hinton and worked to improve his backpropagation techniques, developed convolutional neural networks, the kind of software architecture that gives today’s computer vision systems their power.
- Bengio, who worked with LeCun on computer vision breakthroughs when they were at Bell Labs, went on to apply neural networks to natural language processing, leading to big advances in machine translation. More recently, he has worked on a method best known for enabling neural networks to create completely novel, but highly realistic, images.
(News source: Bloomberg)
