In the field of modern artificial intelligence, all roads seem to lead to three researchers with ties to Canadian universities.
First of all, Jeffrey Hinton, a 70-year-old British man who teaches at the University of Toronto, created a subdiscipline called "deep learning", which has become synonymous with artificial intelligence; secondly, the 57-year-old Yang Likun, a Frenchman, worked in Hinton Laboratory in the 1980s and now teaches at New York University. The third, 54-year-old Joshua Bengio, was born in Paris, grew up in Montreal, and now teaches at the University of Montreal.
These three people are close friends and collaborators, so people in the AI ??field jokingly call them the "Canadian Mafia" or the "Big Three of Deep Learning" (the first two can be viewed on Haisen Big Data WeChat public (Introduced in the previous article)
However, Hinton went to Google in 2013, and Yang Likun went to Facebook. Both maintained academic status. But Joshua did not go to any big company. He founded the world's largest deep learning research group, an independent non-profit organization: the Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms (MILA), and then won the Turing Award.
Joshua - Academic Purist
Joshua was born in Paris, France in 1964. He is an out-and-out academic.
While at McGill University, he earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, a bachelor's degree in computer science, and a doctorate in computer science.
Joshua then continued his studies at the world-class MIT with an NSERC scholarship and became a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Joshua once joined Bell Labs (Bell Labs has a glorious history since its establishment in 1925. It has obtained more than 25,000 patents in one year and won 8 Nobel Prizes. ), Joshua conducted postdoctoral research on learning and visual algorithms at Bell Labs. Here, Joshua met Yang Likun, one of the "three godfathers" mentioned at the beginning of the article, and developed a deep friendship. After coming out of Bell Labs, Joshua has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Computing at the University of Montreal since 1993. After he joined the University of Montreal, what is often mentioned is neither the anecdotes of his experience. It's not his professorship, but the Institute of Learning Algorithms - Mila (full name: Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms) he founded at the University of Montreal in the same year.
Mila focuses on machine learning research, including but not limited to deep learning and reinforcement learning. Today (2020), Mila has approximately 500 researchers, including faculty and students, and is the largest deep learning research group in the world. At the same time, as an independent non-profit organization, Mila also owns the interests of many AI companies. research laboratory.
While teaching and educating people and establishing a non-profit scientific research and education institution, Joshua also developed sequence probability models. Probabilistic models of sequences are considered the pinnacle of neural network research in the 1990s, and modern deep learning speech recognition systems are extending these concepts. Joshua also authored the landmark paper A Neural Probabilistic Language Model that introduced high-dimensional word embeddings and attention to represent word meaning, which has had huge implications for natural language processing tasks including language translation, question answering, and visual question answering. And lasting impact.
Since 2010, Joshua’s papers on deep learning, especially Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) developed in collaboration with Ian Goodfellow , triggering a revolution in computer vision and computer graphics.
"Probabilistic model of sequences" + "High-dimensional word embedding and attention" + "Generative Adversarial Network" = Turing Award
In 2019, Joshua won the 2018 ACM AM Turing Award, that year, two other people won this honor, guess who? That's right, they are Jeffrey Hinton and Yang Likun. From then on, there was the "Trio of AI Godfathers" in the world.