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.

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