Computer Science: French, British and Canadian Winners of Turing Award

Yann LeCun of France, Geoffrey Hinton of Britain, and Yoshua Bengio of Canada, were rewarded on Wednesday for their work on artificial intelligence.

Three specialists in artificial intelligence, French Yann LeCun, Britain's Geoffrey Hinton and Canadian Yoshua Bengio, received Wednesday the Turing Award, the equivalent of the Nobel for computer scientists.

A price of one million dollars. "Artificial intelligence is one of the fastest growing areas of science today and one of the most talked about topics in society," said Cherri Pancake, President of ACM on the website of the association. "The growth of AI and the interest it arouses are due, in large part, to the recent advances in deep learning that Bengio, Hinton and LeCun have laid the foundation for."

From the name of the British mathematician Alan M. Turing, the prize is worth a million dollars and is sponsored by Google. Awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Turing awards the three winners for their work on deep learning.

Work on deep learning. Deep learning (or "deep learning") allows machines to perform complex tasks for which they have been trained, such as voice or visual recognition. This learning is based on networks of artificial neurons, computer systems modeled on those of man.

Yann LeCun is director of the Facebook artificial intelligence lab he joined in 2013 and a professor at New York University. He is the second Frenchman distinguished by this prize after Joseph Sifakis in 2007. "My warmest congratulations to Yann LeCun who has just received the Turing Prize: a new illustration of the excellence of the French computer school", tweeted french president Emmanuel Macron.

France has the assets to be a world leader in artificial intelligence. That's one of our priorities, from the AI ​​plan to digital education at school. Let's not relax efforts.

Yoshua Bengio is Scientific Director at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila). Geoffrey Hinton is a researcher at Google and a professor in the computer science department at the University of Toronto.