ACM A.M. Turing Award 2018: Yoshua Bengio, Yan Lecun and Geoffrey Hinton

The A.M. Turing Award is presented to Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and YannLeCun for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neuralnetworks a critical component of computing.

Working independently and together, Bengio, Hinton and LeCun developed conceptual foundations for the field, identified surprising phenomena through experiments, and contributed engineering advances that demonstrated the practical advantages of deep neural networks. In recent years, deep learning methods have been responsible for astonishing breakthroughs in computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and robotics—among other applications.

While the use of artificial neural networks as a tool to help computers recognize patterns and simulate human intelligence had been introduced in the 1980’s, by the early 2000’s, LeCun, Hinton and Bengio were among a small group who remained committed to this approach. Though their efforts to rekindle the AI community’s interest in neural networks were initially met with skepticism, their ideas resulted in major technological advances, and their methodology is now the dominant paradigm in the field.

This award celebrates the work of one of the founding fathers of modern computer science – Alan Mathison Turing (1912-1954). In a 1936 paper, Turing introduced a precise definition of a computational machine (now called a Turing Machine). He is perhaps best known for his contributions during World War II in cracking the Enigma code. He later studied problems key to artificial intelligence.Accompanied by a prize of $1,000,000, ACM’s most prestigious award is given to recognize contributions of a technical nature which are of lasting and major technical importance to the computing field. Financial support of the A.M. Turing Award is provided by Google Inc.