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Yoshua Bengio (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian
computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...
, most noted for his work on
artificial neural networks Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected uni ...
and
deep learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. D ...
. He is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA). Bengio received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, together with
Geoffrey Hinton Geoffrey Everest Hinton One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on a ...
and
Yann LeCun Yann André LeCun ( , ; originally spelled Le Cun; born 8 July 1960) is a French computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professo ...
, for their work in deep learning. Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun, are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning".


Early life and education

Bengio was born in France to a Jewish family who immigrated to France from Morocco, and then immigrated again to Canada. He received his BScience (electrical engineering),
MEng Meng may refer to: * Meng (surname) (孟), a Chinese surname * Master of Engineering (MEng or M.Eng.), an academic or professional master's degree in the field of engineering * , "M with hook", letter used in the International Phonetic Alphabet * ...
(computer science) and PhD (computer science) from McGill University. Bengio is the brother of
Samy Bengio Samy Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, Senior Director of AI and Machine Learning Research at Apple, and a former long-time scientist at Google known for leading a large group of researchers working in machine learning including adversar ...
, who was a scientist at Google. The Bengio brothers lived in Morocco for a year during their father's military service in Morocco. His father, Carlo Bengio, was a pharmacist who wrote theatre pieces and ran a Sephardic theatrical troupe in Montreal that played
Judeo-Arabic Judeo-Arabic dialects (, ; ; ) are ethnolects formerly spoken by Jews throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Under the ISO 639 international standard for language codes, Judeo-Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage under the code jrb, encom ...
pieces. His mother, Célia Moreno, is also an artist who played in one of the major theatre scenes of Morocco that was run by Tayeb Seddiki in the 1970s.


Career and research

After his PhD, Bengio was a
postdoctoral A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). The ultimate goal of a postdoctoral research position is to p ...
fellow at
MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
(supervised by Michael I. Jordan) and
AT&T Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...
. Bengio has been a faculty member at the Université de Montréal since 1993, heads the MILA ( Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms) and is co-director of the Learning in Machines & Brains project of the
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) is a Canadian-based global research organization that brings together teams of top researchers from around the world to address important and complex questions. It was founded in 1982 and is s ...
. Along with
Geoffrey Hinton Geoffrey Everest Hinton One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on a ...
and
Yann LeCun Yann André LeCun ( , ; originally spelled Le Cun; born 8 July 1960) is a French computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professo ...
, Bengio is considered by Cade Metz as one of the three people most responsible for the advancement of deep learning during the 1990s and 2000s. Among the computer scientists with an
h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with obvious success indicators such as w ...
of at least 100, Bengio is the one with the most recent citations per day, according to MILA. In October 2016, Bengio co-founded
Element AI Element AI was an artificial intelligence company based in Montreal, Quebec. History Element AI was founded in October 2016 by Jean-François Gagné and co-founders Yoshua Bengio, Anne Martel, Nicolas Chapados, and Philippe Beaudoin, along w ...
, a Montreal-based
artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
incubator An incubator is anything that performs or facilitates various forms of incubation, and may refer to: Biology and medicine * Incubator (culture), a device used to grow and maintain microbiological cultures or cell cultures * Incubator (egg), a de ...
that turns AI research into real-world business applications. Having failed to develop marketable products and losing several partnerships, by 2020 the company was running out of money and options and announced its sale to American software company ServiceNow in November. The sale will see largely Canadian taxpayer funded intellectual property exported to the United States, contrary to Bengio's desire to found Element AI as a Canadian company to rival the world's tech giants. Bengio will stay employed as an advisor while the vast majority of employees were terminated with their stock options voided and cancelled with no value in lieu provided. In May 2017, Bengio announced that he was joining Montreal-based legal tech startup Botler AI, as a strategy adviser. Bengio currently serves as scientific and technical advisor for Recursion Pharmaceuticals and scientific advisor for Valence Discovery.


Awards and honours

In 2017, Bengio was named an Officer of the Order of Canada. The same year, he was nominated Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and received the Marie-Victorin Quebec Prize. Together with
Geoffrey Hinton Geoffrey Everest Hinton One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on a ...
and
Yann LeCun Yann André LeCun ( , ; originally spelled Le Cun; born 8 July 1960) is a French computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professo ...
, Bengio won the 2018
Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in comput ...
. In 2020 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 2022 he received the
Princess of Asturias Award The Princess of Asturias Awards ( es, Premios Princesa de Asturias, links=no, ast, Premios Princesa d'Asturies, links=no), formerly the Prince of Asturias Awards from 1981 to 2014 ( es, Premios Príncipe de Asturias, links=no), are a series of a ...
in the category "Scientific Research" with his peers
Yann LeCun Yann André LeCun ( , ; originally spelled Le Cun; born 8 July 1960) is a French computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professo ...
,
Geoffrey Hinton Geoffrey Everest Hinton One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on a ...
and
Demis Hassabis Demis Hassabis (born 27 July 1976) is a British artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur. In his early career he was a video game AI programmer and designer, and an expert player of board games. He is the chief executive officer and ...
.Princess of Asturias Awards 2022
/ref>


Publications

* Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville: ''Deep Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning)'', MIT Press, Cambridge (USA), 2016. . * * Léon Bottou, Patrick Haffner, Paul G. Howard, Patrice Simard, Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun
''High Quality Document Image Compression with DjVu''
In: ''Journal of Electronic Imaging'', Band 7, 1998, S. 410–425 * Bengio, Yoshua; Schuurmans, Dale; Lafferty, John; Williams, Chris K. I. and Culotta, Aron (eds.), ''Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 22 (NIPS'22), December 7th–10th, 2009, Vancouver, BC'', Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Foundation, 2009 * Y. Bengio, Dong-Hyun Lee, Jorg Bornschein, Thomas Mesnard, Zhouhan Lin
''Towards Biologically Plausible Deep Learning''
arXiv.org, 2016 * Bengio contributed one chapter to ''Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it'', Packt Publishing, 2018, , by the American futurist Martin Ford.


References


External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Bengio, Yoshua 1964 births Living people Artificial intelligence researchers Artificial intelligence ethicists Canadian computer scientists Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence French emigrants to Quebec French people of Moroccan-Jewish descent Canadian people of Moroccan-Jewish descent Canadian Sephardi Jews Machine learning researchers McGill University Faculty of Engineering alumni Université de Montréal faculty Turing Award laureates Jewish Canadian scientists Mizrahi Jews Canadian Fellows of the Royal Society Officers of the Order of Canada