On Wednesday 27th March 2019, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio were crown by the Association for Computing Machinery. They received the award in recognition of their work as major players in the achievement of Artificial Intelligence technology.

 

Artificial Intelligence

The three Canadian men are responsible for the advent of Artificial Intelligence.  The Turing Award was named after British mathematician Alan Turing. It is the “Nobel Prize” award for tech by players in the industry. Turing laid the theoretical foundations for Computer Science in 1946. Funded by Google, the award comes with a $1 million prize.

 

These men helped advance the thinking and application of neural networks. The technology gives computers the ability to recognise patterns, get insight from complex data and interpret language.

 

The president of the computing society, Cherri Pancake, acknowledged their effort in the growth of AI. She said in a statement that the growth and interest in AI right now were due to the recent advances by these men. Artificial intelligence is also “one of the most talked-about topics in society.”

 

The three men had made efforts to introduce algorithms that extract patterns in data. At first, it was not widely accepted. But their commitment and perseverance have led to breakthroughs in robotics, speech recognition and machine learning. The fact that we can now use tools like Alexa and Siri is largely influenced by their research. Their research is very useful. It will propel further advancements in medicine, law, commerce, business, innovation and transportation. A lot of the smartphone technologies now used are largely based on the researches of the trio.

 

Artificial Intelligence is the future of technology. Self-driving cars, motorcycles, and an AI-powered Judge are only some of the things the future has in store. This is all thanks to the power of technology. There is a fear that machines might take over all our jobs. But so far, it is not a pressing concern.

 

Yoshua Bengio

Yoshua Bengio is the Scientific Director at Quebec’s Artificial Intelligence Institute and the Institute for Data Valorization. He is also a professor at the University of Montreal since 1993.

 

Geoffrey Hinton

Geoffrey Hinton is a vice president and engineering fellow at Google. He got a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh in 1978.

 

Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun is the vice president and chief AI scientist at Facebook. He is also a mathematical sciences professor at New York University.