Yoshua Bengio

Early Life and Education

Yoshua Bengio was born in France but moved to Canada at a young age, where he pursued his education. He attended McGill University in Montreal, earning a B.Eng. in Computer Engineering with honors in 1986. He then continued at McGill to obtain his M.Sc. in Computer Science in 1988, focusing on speech recognition with statistical methods. Bengio completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at McGill in 1991, where he studied neural networks and Markovian models under an NSERC scholarship.

After his Ph.D., Bengio undertook postdoctoral fellowships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1991 to 1992, working with Michael I. Jordan on statistical learning and sequential data, and at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1992 to 1993, working on learning and vision algorithms with Larry Jackel and Yann LeCun.

Academic and Professional Career

In September 1993, Yoshua Bengio joined the Université de Montréal (UdeM) as a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research. He was appointed Full Professor and has remained at UdeM throughout his career.

Founding Mila and IVADO

In 1993, Bengio founded the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), initially known as LISA. MILA has grown into one of the largest academic institutes for deep learning research. In 2016, he became the Scientific Director of the Institute for Data Valorization (IVADO).

CIFAR and AI Leadership

Yoshua Bengio co-directs the CIFAR Learning in Machines & Brains program, which funded initial breakthroughs in deep learning. Since 2019, he holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and is Co-Chair of Canada's Advisory Council on AI. He is also a Senior Fellow at CIFAR and has been involved with the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research since 2004.

Industry and Conference Involvement

Bengio is a co-founder and board member of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) and has served on advisory boards for several organizations, including the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Foundation. He has been a prolific contributor to NeurIPS, serving in various roles including General Chair in 2009 and Program Co-Chair in 2008.

Research and Contributions

Yoshua Bengio is recognized as one of the leading experts in artificial intelligence, particularly in deep learning. His research has significantly impacted the field, with pioneering work on neural networks, generative adversarial networks (GANs), and neural machine translation. Some of his notable publications include:

"Deep Learning" (2016) with Ian Goodfellow and Aaron Courville source
"Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate" (2015) with Dzmitry Bahdanau and Kyunghyun Cho source
"Deep Learning" (2015) with Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton source

Awards and Honors

Major Awards

A.M. Turing Award 2018: Awarded jointly with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for their contributions to deep learning, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing" source
Killam Prize in Natural Sciences 2019: Recognized for outstanding contributions in the field source
IEEE CIS Neural Networks Pioneer Award 2019: Awarded by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society for pioneering work in neural networks source

Fellowships and Orders

Fellow of the Royal Society of London (2020): One of the oldest and most prestigious scientific institutions source
Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2017): Recognizing outstanding achievements in research and scholarship source
Officer of the Order of Canada (2017): One of the highest civilian honors in Canada for outstanding achievement and service source
Knight of the Legion of Honor of France (2022): The highest French order of merit for military and civil merits source

Other Recognitions

Bengio has received numerous other accolades, such as the Marie-Victorin Award (2017), Radio-Canada's Scientist of the Year (2017), and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian AI Association (2018).

Impact and Legacy

Yoshua Bengio has been a central figure in advancing the field of artificial intelligence, particularly in deep learning. His work has influenced many areas, from academic research to practical applications in industry. He continues to be an advocate for the ethical development of AI and its benefits for society.

For more detailed information, you can refer to his full CV.

Dr. Yoshua Bengio

Biography