First of all, Jeffrey Hinton, a 70-year-old Englishman who teaches at the University of Toronto, started a branch discipline called "deep learning", which has become synonymous with artificial intelligence; Secondly, Yang Likun, a 57-year-old Frenchman, worked in Hinton Laboratory in 1980s and now teaches at new york University. The third is 54-year-old Joshua Bengio, who 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 nicknamed them "Canadian Mafia" or "Deep Learning Big Three" (the first two can be seen in the article introduction before Haisen Big Data WeChat official account)
However, Hinton went to Google 20 13, and Yang Likun went to Facebook. Both of them maintained their academic status. But Joshua didn't go to any big company. He founded the world's largest deep learning research group, an independent non-profit organization: MILA, and then won the Turing Award.
Joshua-academic purist
Joshua 1964 was born in Paris, France, and he is a real schoolmaster.
When he was at McGill University, he got a bachelor's degree in electronic engineering, a bachelor's degree in computer science and a doctor's degree in computer science at one go.
Then Joshua went on to study at MIT, a world-class prestigious school, won a NSERC scholarship and became a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science.
Joshua once joined Bell Laboratories (Bell Laboratories has a glorious history since the establishment of 1925, and won more than 25,000 patents and 8 Nobel Prizes. ), Joshua conducted postdoctoral research on learning and visual algorithms at Bell Laboratories. Here, Joshua met Yang Likun, one of the "Three Godfathers" mentioned at the beginning of the article, and forged a profound friendship. After coming out of Bell Laboratories, 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 was often mentioned was neither his anecdote nor his teaching career, but Mila (full name: Montreal Learning Algorithm Institute), the learning algorithm institute 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 about 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 has many research laboratories of AI company.
While teaching and educating people and establishing non-profit scientific research and education institutions, Joshua also developed a sequential probability model. The probability model of sequence is considered as the peak of neural network research in11990s, and modern deep learning speech recognition system is expanding these concepts. Joshua also wrote a landmark paper, a neural probabilistic language model, which introduced high-dimensional word embedding and attention to express the meaning of words, and had a great and lasting impact on natural language processing tasks, including language translation, problem solving and visual problem solving.
Since 20 10, Joshua's papers on deep learning, especially the Generative Confrontation Network (GAN) jointly developed with Ian Goodfellow, have triggered a revolution in computer vision and computer graphics.
"Probability Model of Sequence"+"Embedding and Attention of High Dimensional Words"+"Generating Antagonistic Network" = Turing Prize
In 20 19, Joshua won the ACAM Turing Award. That year, two more people won this honor. Guess who it is? Yes, it's Jeffrey Hinton and Yang Likun. Since then, there has been an "AI Godfather Trio" in the world.