Yoshua Bengio (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian computer scientist known for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the University of Montreal, and the scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA).
Bengio, together withGeoffrey HintonandYann LeCun, received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their work on deep learning. Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun are sometimes called the "fathers of artificial intelligence" and the "fathers of deep learning."
Early life and education
Bengio was born in France to a Jewish family that had emigrated from Morocco to France and then emigrated again to Canada. He received a Bachelor of Science degree (electrical engineering), a Doctor of Medicine degree (computer science), and a PhD (computer science) from McGill University.
Bengio is the brother of Samy Bengio, who was formerly a scientist at Google. The Bengio brothers lived in Morocco for a year while their father was serving there. His father, Carlo Bengio, was a pharmacist who wrote theatrical works and ran a Sephardic theater company in Montreal that performed Judeo-Arabic works. His mother, Célia Moreno, was also an artist and had played roles in the main Moroccan theater scene run by Tayeb Seddiki in the 1970s.
Life and research fields
After completing his PhD, Bengio was a postdoc at MIT (supervised by Michael I. Jordan) and AT&T Bell Labs. Bengio has been a faculty member at the University of Montreal since 1993, the head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), and a co-director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research's program on Learning in Machines and Brains.
Cade Metz considers Bengio, along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, to be one of the three people who contributed most to the development of deep learning in the 1990s and early 2000s. According to MILA, among computer scientists with an h-index of at least 100, Bengio is the one most cited per day.
In October 2016, Bengio co-founded Element AI, an AI incubator based in Montreal that translated AI research into real-world commercial applications. Due to failing to develop a marketable product and losing several partners, by 2020 the company had run out of funding and options, and in November it announced its sale to the American software company ServiceNow. The sale exported intellectual property largely funded by Canadian taxpayers to the United States, contrary to Bengio's wish for Element AI to be a Canadian company competing with the world's tech giants.
In May 2017, Bengio announced that he was joining the Montreal-based legal tech startup Botler AI as a strategic advisor.
Bengio currently serves as a scientific and technical advisor to Recursion Pharmaceuticals and a scientific advisor to Valence Discovery.
Awards and honors
- A.M. Turing Award (2018)
- Killam Prize in Natural Sciences (2018)
- Fellow of the Royal Society of London (2020)
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2017)
- Knight of the French Legion of Honor (2022)
- Member of the Order of Canada (2017)
- IEEE CIS Neural Networks Pioneer Award (2019)