Artificial intelligence pioneers Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yoshua Bengio have been crowned the winners of the highly sought after Turing Award, which is awarded each year by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
The trio — who have been nicknamed the "Godfathers of AI" — split their time between academia and industry: LeCun works at Facebook and New York University; Hinton works at Google and The University of Toronto; and Bengio collaborates with Microsoft and IBM, while also holding a post at McGill University.
The computer scientists, who met more than three decades ago, will be given $1 million to share between them as a result of winning the award.
The ACM said Bengio, LeCun, and Hinton won the award for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.
ACM president Cherri Pancake said in a statement:
"Artificial intelligence is now one of the fastest-growing areas in all of science and one of the most talked-about topics in society. The growth of and interest in AI is due, in no small part, to the recent advances in deep learning for which Bengio, Hinton and LeCun laid the foundation. These technologies are used by billions of people.
"Anyone who has a smartphone in their pocket can tangibly experience advances in natural language processing and computer vision that were not possible just 10 years ago. In addition to the products we use every day, new advances in deep learning have given scientists powerful new tools — in areas ranging from medicine, to astronomy, to materials science."
Following the win, LeCun said in a blog post: "All three of us got into this field not just because we want to build intelligent machines, but also because we just wanted to understand intelligence — and that includes human intelligence. We’re looking for underlying principles to intelligence and learning, and through the construction of intelligent machines, to understand ourselves."
The ACM will present the award at its annual Awards Banquet on June 15 in San Francisco, California.
