Recently winners of Turing Award have been announced as Yann LeCun, Geoff Hinton, and Yoshua Bengio for contribution Artificial intelligence.

Godfathers of Artificial Intelligence

Let’s learn about their journey and the evolution of Artificial intelligence.

Alan Turing

Alan Turing, the British mathematician who is also considered as the father of mathematics laid the foundation for computers and artificial intelligence. The famous P & NP problems that are taught to computer science students is the base for the Turing test (Turing test was designed). The Turing test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950 is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses which laid the foundation to researches on AI.

Yann LeCun, Geoff Hinton, and Yoshua Bengio

Geoff Hinton is from a long line of the family consisting of mathematician and scientists. He continued his study at the University of Edinburgh where he was awarded a PhD in artificial intelligence in 1977 for research supervised by his mentor Christopher Longuet-Higgins. Geoff Hinton co-authored & published a seminal 1986 paper on a learning algorithm called backpropagation. That algorithm, known as a backdrop, is at the heart of deep learning today, but back then the technology wasn’t developed enough to run the multi-layered neural networks so that results with minimum error can be generated.

Godfathers of AI

The era of the ’90s to 2000s was the darkest era of AI, in those days everyone started considering AI research to be a waste of time as it seemed impossible to achieve the desired result. Nobody in America wanted to talk about AI so Geoff moved to Canada, the Canadian government was funding the researches on a massive scale to boost the employment rate in the country.

Later in the second half of 2000’s the unprecedented power of High GPUs and sophisticated computing hardware enabled these researchers to run their algorithms for real on computers. The algorithms to run convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks were written in code which was then fed multiple data sets to train models.

Geoff Hinton was hired by Google to develop its image recognition, speech recognition, Natural language processing projects. The enormous data that Google had worked as a catalytic reaction with Geoff’s idea of backpropagation in multi-layered neural networks. It was him who made possible Google voice assistant, Google translator and many more with AI development.

Facebook chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is a French scientist who was a research fellow at Geoff Hinton’s lab. Lecun’s work on optical character recognition and convolutional neural networks is noticeable.

Yoshua Bengio invented neural network designs which are well suited to images; he proved the concept by creating check-reading software for ATMs at Bell Labs. Bengio pioneered methods to apply deep learning to sequences, such as speech and understanding text (Natural language Processing & OCR). The ability to harness GPU’s computing capabilities has given a boost to researches based on Convolutional neural networks, the data processing method of GPU’s is well suited for the processing of data in convolutional neural networks.

Noam Chomsky, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, Ray Kurzweil & Andrew Ng are some notable researches about whom we have already discussed in our previous article Latest Artificial Intelligence Trends 2019.