Four professors laid the foundation for the development of AI

Three of the four professors said to have had the greatest influence on the development of AI have received prestigious awards in computer science.

In early May, Geoffrey Hinton, known as the "godfather" of the AI ​​field, decided to leave Google so he could warn about the dangers behind AI, causing the world to start paying more attention to the pioneers. in the field of artificial intelligence.

Geoffrey Hinton

Geoffrey Hinton is one of the pioneers of AI. Photo: Reuters

This 75-year-old British-Canadian professor is world-famous for his work on artificial neural networks - a technology that attempts to mimic the way the human brain works and is the basis for most products. AI today, from Google Translate, Bard, ChatGPT to self-driving cars.

With his research and development of deep learning algorithms and applications in fields such as speech recognition, machine translation, and natural language processing, Geoffrey Hinton is one of the most inspirational and influential people in the world. greatly influenced the next generation of AI researchers.

He is also a professor at the University of Toronto and one of the co-founders of the company Google Brain. He advocates complete simulation of the human brain and asserts that there is no reason to think computers cannot be more intelligent than humans. However, he emphasized the importance of responsible AI development and the need to ensure that AI decisions do not harm or bias individuals and communities.

In 2018, Hinton, along with Yoshua Bengio and Yan LeCun, were awarded the Turning Prize - an award likened to the Nobel in the field of computer science. All three work together on neural networks, a type of machine learning software that simulates how the human brain works - one of the greatest advances in modern science and has a great influence on human development. development of AI.

In early May, he caused a stir when he decided to resign from his position as vice president and technology manager at Google so he could speak publicly about the threat of AI to humanity. "In fact, I left so I could talk about the dangers of AI without having to consider how this affects Google," he wrote on Twitter on May 1 after resigning.

Joshua Bengio

Yoshua Bengio is the founder of Mila AI Research Institute. Photo: Yoshuabengio

Professor Yoshua Bengio, born in 1964 from Canada, is also one of the scientists who laid the foundation for the development of artificial intelligence and pioneered the field of deep learning.

In 1993, he founded the Mila Research Institute and became a global center of scientific advances, making an important contribution to making Montreal (Canada) a global center for deep learning technology. By 2020, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Samsung had all established satellite laboratories in Montreal.

In addition to the prestigious Turing Award, Bengio is also the second most cited computer scientist in the world according to Guide2Research in 2021.

Interested in social impact and the goal of AI benefiting all, he has actively contributed to the Montreal Declaration on the Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence. At the Canada - Vietnam AI Summit in early June in Quebec, Professor Bengio said that to promote strong development of AI, legal barriers are needed when applied to real life. Before laws can create change, education is the fastest and most sustainable tool for humans to accompany AI.

Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun. Photo: UCLA

Yann LeCun, born in 1960, is one of the pioneers in the fields of deep learning and convolutional neural networks (CNN). This French scientist developed the LeNet model in the 1990s, the first CNN model used for handwriting recognition. CNN has become an important tool in the field of computer vision and image processing, underpinning many products and services deployed by companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Baidu, IBM, NEC , AT&T in video, document, photo, and voice recognition.

He also proposed the Deep Q-Network (DQN) model in 2013. This is a method that uses deep learning to train AI systems to play video games. He was awarded the Turning Prize for the conceptual and technical breakthroughs that made deep neural networks a key component of computing.

Professor LeCun has published more than 200 articles on this topic as well as on handwriting recognition, image compression, and specialized hardware for AI. He is currently the Research Director of Meta AI Research (FAIR), a leading research organization in the field of AI.

Andrew Ng

Andrew Ng. Photo: Coursera

Andrew Ng, born in 1976, is a Chinese-American computer scientist. He is not only famous in the fields of machine learning and AI but also has made many important contributions to the development and dissemination of online courses, helping millions of people around the world to access and learn about these two fields. .

He co-founded Coursera - an online learning platform that has created a revolution in teaching and learning. He is also the founding leader of Google Brain and a visiting professor at Stanford University. Andrew Ng is currently the CEO of Landing.AI and DeepLearning.AI.

His most famous work is developing deep learning models in the field of computer vision and image processing. This is an important breakthrough for many successful applications such as facial recognition, object recognition and autonomous vehicles. He also contributed to projects like Google Street View and Google Photos, which use deep learning technology to classify images.

In 2008, he was honored by MIT Technology Review as one of the 35 most creative people under 35 in the world. In 2013, he was named in Time 100 - a list of the 100 most influential people in the world in various fields.