The 'Godfathers of AI' win Turing Award

The winners of the 2018 Turing Award have been announced.

Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio -- sometimes referred to as the “godfathers of artificial intelligence” -- have won the 2018 Turing Award for their work on neural networks. The three artificial intelligence pioneers' work basically laid the foundation for modern AI technologies.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, artificial intelligence experienced a renewed popularity within the scientific community. However, by the mid-90s, scientists had failed to make any major advancements in AI, making it harder to secure funding or publish research. Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio remained undeterred and continued with their work.

In 2004, in an effort to revive the field, Hinton put together a new research program with “less than $400,000 in funding from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.” The program would focus on “neural computation and adaptive perception.” Bengio and LeCun joined Hinton in the program.

By 2012, the Hinton-led program came up with a deep learning neural network algorithm that performed more than 40 percent better than what came before.

Self-driving cars, voice assistants, and facial recognition technology are just a few of the advancements made possible by Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio’s work.

The award, named after British mathematician Alan Turing, carries a $1 million prize, which the trio will split. Previous Turing Award winners include Tim Berners-Lee, best known for inventing the World Wide Web.

Hinton is currently a top AI researcher at Google. LeCun is now at Facebook, working as the company’s chief AI scientist. Bengio has remained in academia but has worked with companies such as AT&T, Microsoft, and IBM.