Geoff Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio will split the US$1-million Turing Award prize
Three computer scientists who laid the foundations for many of the recent advances in artificial intelligence are being honoured with this year’s Turing Award, considered the field’s highest accolade.
This year’s three winners are often referred to collectively as the “Godfathers of Deep Learning” for their research into neural networks — a kind of machine-learning software that loosely mimics the way the human brain works. Today, deep neural networks using backpropagation underpin most advances in artificial intelligence, from Facebook’s ability to automatically tag your friends in photos to the voice recognition capabilities of Amazon.com Inc.’s Alexa and Google’s translations from English to Mandarin.
Hinton, in an interview ahead of the announcement, said he believes deep learning will eventually allow computers to have human-like or even super-human intelligence. Hinton disparaged the idea — which has been advocated by New York University professor Gary Marcus among others — that deep learning will need to be combined with older, symbolic AI techniques to achieve human-level intelligence. Hinton compared this to using electric motors only to run the fuel-injectors of gasoline engines, even though electricity is far more energy efficient.
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