Yoshua Bengio describes himself as more of an introvert than an extrovert, and the Canada Council just made his life a little harder.

On Thursday, the public arts funding agency named the Université de Montréal computer science and operational research professor one of this year’s Killam Prize recipients, alongside U de M political science professor André Blais, two professors from the University of Toronto and one from the University of Waterloo.

The awards have been piling up for Bengio, who last year won the Turing Award, often described as the Nobel Prize of computing, and in 2017 was named an Officer of the Order of Canada.

“I don’t particularly enjoy all this attention,” he said, reached in his U de M office, Thursday morning. “It’s good for the missions I’ve given myself, but I don’t take huge pleasure in ceremonies and awards.

“That said, it’s really important that in Canada we recognize the people who contribute markedly to our society because humans are still motivated by these things, not just by money. It feels good to do something greater than yourself.”

Bengio is one of the world’s leading researchers on artificial intelligence.

He is a founder and scientific director at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, a partnership between U de M and McGill, which in January opened its 90,000-square-foot headquarters in Mile Ex, and will receive $120 million in government funding over the next five years.

He sees the Killam Prize as recognition not just of his own work but of the work of all of his collaborators and students over the past decade. And as such, he’ll take it.

“The Killam Prize is one of Canada’s most recognized prizes for academics,” he acknowledged.

“I didn’t expect 10 years ago that we would have such a transformative effect on society. Ten to 20 years ago, this area of research was not popular, trendy or fashionable. It’s thanks to governments who continued investing in curiosity-based research. If it wasn’t for the system we have in Canada, we wouldn’t have this impact we’re seeing today.”

Bengio’s specialty is deep learning, an offshoot of AI that has brought a lot of attention his way in recent years, but which has been a long time coming, he explained.

“Deep learning didn’t appear in a vacuum,” he said. “It came from decades of work building on neural networks, and an approach to AI inspired by the computation of the brain. We brought new solutions to how to train those networks. It’s only in the last eight years or so that we’ve seen the impact of those ideas in practice.

“It started with computer vision, computers can now see a lot better than before. Computers can analyze speech, one of the first applications of which is speech recognition on your phone.”

The world of AI is still in its infancy and there is a long way to go, Bengio noted. But a threshold has been passed in terms of how it is used in the world.

“AI is now not just in universities,” he said. “It’s out there in the industry. It’s on your phone, it’s going to change factories, (bring us) self-driving cars and so on.”

The Killam Prize comes with $100,000. Bengio hasn’t decided what he will do with the funds, and he wasn’t interested in dwelling on it.

“Too much emphasis is put on money in our society,” he said. “I wish that young people (would) work on something they’re passionate about, not to get rich or win a prize.”

Bengio is more concerned about the future of AI. He was a contributor to the Montreal Declaration for Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence, released last year.

“The new thing in my vision of AI is realizing that we’re creating very powerful tools, which can be incredibly useful for society, but which can also be misused. It’s going to take individual and collective wisdom — governments stepping in to establish social norms and frameworks — to make sure the technology is used for good.”

If he can use his growing profile to help steer AI in the right direction, Bengio will accept the Killam Prize and others with a smile.

He’s smart enough to know that the attention can only be a good thing for the continued expansion of his chosen area of research.

“These prizes help further the discussion in the media and to attract more investments,” he said. “More students are choosing AI because it’s getting so much visibility and recognition, celebrating the fact that it’s changing the world.” tdunlevy@postmedia.com Twitter.com/TChaDunlevy