Yoshua Bengio

1 minute read
By Geoffrey Hinton

Yoshua Bengio is a world leader in AI. Throughout his career, Yoshua’s research has been instrumental in shaping the world’s understanding of AI’s potential—and that same expertise has made his perspective more essential than ever. His pioneering research on deep learning laid the foundations for the current revolution in AI and earned him the 2018 Turing Award—“the Nobel Prize of Computing”—alongside myself and Yann LeCun. Last year, Yoshua received Canada’s highest award for research, the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal. He is the computer scientist with the greatest number of citations and is ranked third among all disciplines for scientific impact.

Yoshua has been concerned for many years with the social impact of artificial intelligence, contributing to the Montreal Declaration for the Responsible Development of AI. Over the past year, worried by the potential for catastrophic outcomes from future AI, he was vocal in global conversations on AI safety. He advised the U.N. Secretary-General and the U.K. AI Safety Institute, and took part in policy discussions with governments in North America, Asia, and Europe. 

Hinton is a cognitive psychologist and computer scientist

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