Science and technology

Canadian researchers who taught AI to learn like humans win $1M Turing Award

Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun share ‘Nobel of computer science’ for work on deep learning
Emily Chung · CBC News ·

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Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, left to right, are the winners of this year’s $1 million US Turing Award, the world’s top prize in computer science, the Association for Computing Machinery announced Wednesday. (Université de Montréal/Google/Facebook)

Three researchers, two of them Canadian, have won the world’s top award in computer science for developing the ability of computers to learn like humans, by imitating the human brain and how it functions using networks of “neurons.”

That allows computers to acquire new skills by looking at lots of examples and finding and recognizing patterns, as humans do.

Machine learning — based on “deep learning” and “neural networks” —  has led to the development of artificial intelligence that now powers everyday web and smartphone applications from voice, image and facial recognition to language translation. It’s increasingly being used in more complicated tasks like generating art, creating text and diagnosing cancer from images.

The Turing Award is described by the Association for Computing Machinery, which hands out the annual award, as the “Nobel Prize of Computing” and worth $1 million US. The association announced Wednesday that the 2018 award goes to:

  • Yoshua Bengio, professor at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of Mila, Quebec’s Artificial Intelligence Institute.
  • Geoffrey Hinton, emeritus professor at the University of Toronto, vice-president and engineer fellow at Google, and chief scientific advisor at the Vector Institute.
  • Yann LeCun, professor at New York University and vice-president and chief AI scientist for Facebook, who did his postdoctoral work at Hinton’s University of Toronto lab and then worked with Bengio at Bell Labs.

The Turing Award is named after British mathematician, computer scientist and Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing. It has been sponsored by Google since 2014, but the company said it’s not involved with the selection committee, which honours “lasting contributions to the field of computer science.”

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