Yoshua Bengio

Yoshua Bengio is one of the three godfathers of AI and a recipient of the prestigious Turing Award. Internationally renowned for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning, he recently caused alarm for publicly declaring regret for his life’s work on AI. Believing that AI is a threat to humanity, Yoshua joins fellow godfather Geoffery Hinton in calling for the immediate regulation of AI. In his speaking engagements, he delves into the challenges caused by AI, including privacy concerns, bias, and autonomous weapons, among others.

In 1982, Yoshua obtained a B.Eng in Computer Engineering and an MSc in Computer Science at McGill University. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992, specialising in sequential data and statistical learning. Building further on his research, he completed another postdoc at AT&T Bell Laboratories, focusing on vision algorithms and learning. He joined the Universite de Montreal as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations in 1993, a position which he still currently holds.

Yoshua is the founder and Scientific Director of MILA, one of the world’s premier academic institutions in deep learning. A foremost expert in AI, he is also the Scientific Director of IVADO and co-director of the CIFAR Learning in Machines & Brains program. Furthermore, he co-founded the ICLR conference and is an Advisory Member of the NeurIPS Foundation board. Alongside Geoffery Hinton and Yann LeCunn, Yoshua is the recipient of the Turing Award, the highest award in computer science, only comparable to the Nobel Prize. A distinguished academic, in 2018, Yoshua became the most cited computer scientist worldwide. He also has the largest h-index impact factor in computer science globally.

In recognition of his contributions to AI, he was awarded the IEEE CIS Neural Networks Pioneer Award and the Killian Prize in 2019. Yoshua is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and London, a learned society comprised of the brightest minds in the world. He is also co-author of Deep Learning with his former student Ian Goodfellow. The main figure behind the Montreal Declaration for The Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence, Yoshua, is fighting to regulate AI before his fears materialise. Warning of the potential for AI to erase humanity, in his speaking engagements, he raises awareness of AI risk.