Here are some of the present day heroes of artificial intelligence. If not for the contributions of these lads, AI would not have been what it is today.

|Andrew Ng|

“AI is the new electricity”

Andrew Ng in front of coursera’s office in Mountain view

If you’re a machine learning and ai enthusiast, you definitely must know this guy. He is best known for his machine learning course on coursera which, for many, has been the first step in understanding artificial intelligence(read my blog about it here). Andrew has been teaching at stanford ever since he got his Phd in 2002. He founded and led the google brain team which is considered as one of the most progressive ML/AI research organisations in the world.

He also founded the popular massive open online course (MOOC) site coursera, which now has over a thousand courses taught by ivy league professors. It is from Andrew Ng’s ML course on coursera that he earned his fame. We can say undoubtedly that his course is one of the best out there. The course has now been taken by more than 100,000 students worldwide.

fun fact: go visit any ML/AI expert’s linkedin profile, this ML course will most probably be one of the first courses they took online.

Andrew Ng just launched a $175 million AI fund recently for AI related startups. read more about it here.

a screen grab from the ML course on coursera

|Geoffrey Hinton|

“the future depends on some graduate student who is deeply suspicious about everything i’v said”

Geoffrey Hinton in front of the google campus, Mountain View

Also known as The Godfather of AI. Geoffrey Hinton is one of the first researchers in the field of neural networks. While he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he was one of the first researchers who demonstrated the generalized back-propagation algorithm. This was in 1985. But due to the lack of computational power at that time, not much could be achieved using the algorithm. It was later in 2012 that he used he same algorithm to train deep neural networks and created a major milestone in image recognition. Under the guidance of Andrew Ng, he released his neural networks course on coursera which has been a huge success.

An interesting fact about Geoffrey is that he first took a masters in psychology, in an attempt to understand how the brain works. He then for a brief period of time, also worked as a carpenter. It was then that he took a course in artificial intelligence and has been in the field ever since.

Geoffrey Hinton now shuttles between teaching at University Of Toronto and doing research at google brain.

An interesting fact is that though he founded the modern back-propagation algorithm which is said to mimic how the brain thinks, He is not very confident about his findings. Geoffrey said in an interview,

My view is throw it all away and start again. the future depends on some graduate student who is deeply suspicious about everything i’v said.

Fun Fact: Geoffrey Hinton has a serious spine injury and he last sat down in 2005.

Geoffrey Hinton during one of his speeches.

|Ian Goodfellow|

He’s the inventor of GANs. (Generative Adversarial Networks)

In 2014, Ian published a paper on GANs and it has been a breakthrough in the AI industry. GANs basically allow computers to sort of imagine. Computers can be trained to make models similar to the models that we feed to it.

After graduating from stanford and later taking a Phd in machine learning, He now does research at Google Brain.

Read more about GANs here.

Ian’s book ‘Deep Learning’ in one of the best books on the topic.

|Yann LeCun|

Known for inventing Convolutional Neural Nets, Image recognition would not have progressed without his contributions.

He graduated from France and took a Phd from University Of Toronto. He is also said to have helped in forming the back-propagation algorithm.

In 2017, LeCun declined an invitation to lecture at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia because he was considered a terrorist in the country in view of his atheism.

He was the first head of Facebook AI research in New York.