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Main titles and distinctions

  • A.M. Turing Award 2018
  • Killam Prize in Natural Sciences 2018
  • Fellow of the Royal Society of London 2020
  • Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada 2017
  • Knight of the Legion of Honor of France 2022
  • Officer of the Order of Canada 2017
  • IEEE CIS Neural Networks Pioneer award 2019
  • Full Professor, Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, UdeM
  • Founder and Scientific Director of Mila
  • Scientific Director of IVADO
  • Canada CIFAR AI Chair
  • Co-Director of the CIFAR Learning in Machines & Brains program
 
 

Biography

Download the full CV

Short Version:

Yoshua Bengio is Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at Université de Montreal, as well as the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila and the Scientific Director of IVADO. Considered one of the world’s leaders in artificial intelligence and deep learning, he is the recipient of the 2018 A.M. Turing Award with Geoff Hinton and Yann LeCun, known as the Nobel prize of computing.


He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of London and Canada, an Officer of the Order of Canada, Knight of the Legion of Honor of France, Member of the UN’s Scientific Advisory Board for Independent Advice on Breakthroughs in Science and Technology and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair.

Medium Version:

Recognized worldwide as one of the leading experts in artificial intelligence, Yoshua Bengio is most known for his pioneering work in deep learning, earning him the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, “the Nobel Prize of Computing,” with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun. 

He is Full Professor at Université de Montréal, and the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila – Quebec AI Institute. He co-directs the CIFAR Learning in Machines & Brains program as Senior Fellow and acts as Scientific Director of IVADO. 

In 2019, he was awarded the prestigious Killam Prize and in 2022, became the most cited computer scientist in the world. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of London and Canada, Knight of the Legion of Honor of France, Officer of the Order of Canada, Member of the UN’s Scientific Advisory Board for Independent Advice on Breakthroughs in Science and Technology since 2023 and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair.

Concerned about the social impact of AI, he actively contributed to the Montreal Declaration for the Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence.

Longer Version:

Yoshua Bengio is recognized worldwide as one of the leading experts in artificial intelligence, known for his conceptual and engineering breakthroughs in artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at Université de Montréal and the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, one of the largest academic institutes in deep learning and one of the three federally-funded centers of excellence in AI research and innovation in Canada.

He began his studies in Montreal, where he obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from McGill University in 1991. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on statistical learning and sequential data, he completed a second postdoc at AT&T Bell Laboratories, in Holmdel, NJ, on learning and vision algorithms in 1992-1993. In September 1993,  he returned to Montreal and joined UdeM as a faculty member. 

In 2016, he became the Scientific Director of IVADO. He is Co-Director of the CIFAR Learning in Machines & Brains program that funded the initial breakthroughs in deep learning and since 2019, holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and is Co-Chair of Canada’s Advisory Council on AI. 

In 2022, Yoshua Bengio became the most cited computer scientist in the world (h-index). Concerned about the social impact of AI, he actively took part in the conception of the Montreal Declaration for the Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence. His goal is to contribute to uncovering the principles giving rise to intelligence through learning while favouring the development of AI for the benefit of all.

Yoshua Bengio was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2017 and in 2020, became a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. From 2000 to 2019, he held the Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning Algorithms. He is a member of the NeurIPS Foundation advisory board and Co-Founder of the ICLR conference.

His scientific contributions have earned him numerous awards, including the 2019 Killam Prize for Natural Sciences, the 2017 Government of Québec Marie-Victorin Award, the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian AI Association, the Prix d’excellence FRQNT (2019), the Medal of the 50th Anniversary of the Ministry of International Relations and Francophonie (2018), the 2019 IEEE CIS Neural Networks Pioneer Award, Acfas’s Urgel-Archambault Prize (2009) and in 2017, he was named Radio-Canada’s Scientist of the Year.

He is the 2018 laureate of the A.M. Turing Award, “the Nobel Prize of Computing,” alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for their important contributions and advances in deep learning. In 2022, he was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor by France and named co-laureate of Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award for technical and scientific research. In 2023, Yoshua Bengio was appointed a Member of the UN’s Scientific Advisory Board for Independent Advice on Breakthroughs in Science and Technology.

Selected Publications

Goodfellow, Ian J., Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville (2016). Deep Learning. MIT Press.

Bahdanau, Dzmitry, Kyunghyun Cho, and Yoshua Bengio (2015). “Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate”. In: ICLR’2015, arXiv:1409.0473.

LeCun, Yann, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton (2015). “Deep Learning”. In: Nature 521.7553, pp. 436–444.

Dauphin, Yann, Razvan Pascanu, Caglar Gulcehre, Kyunghyun Cho, Surya Ganguli, and Yoshua Bengio (2014). “Identifying and attacking the saddle point problem in high-dimensional non-convex optimization”. In: NIPS’2014, arXiv:1406.2572.

Montufar, Guido F., Razvan Pascanu, KyungHyun Cho, and Yoshua Bengio (2014). “On the Number of Linear Regions of Deep Neural Networks”. In: NIPS’2014, arXiv:1402.1869.

Goodfellow, Ian J., Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, and Yoshua Bengio (2014). “Generative Adversarial Networks”. In: NIPS’2014, arXiv:1406.2661.

Pascanu, Razvan, Guido Montufar, and Yoshua Bengio (2014). “On the number of inference regions of deep feed forward networks with piece-wise linear activations”. In: International Conference on Learning Representations 2014 (Conference Track),arXiv:1305.6663.

Yoshua Bengio, Li Yao, Guillaume Alain, and Pascal Vincent (2013). “Generalized Denoising Auto-Encoders as Generative Models”. In: NIPS’2013, arXiv:1305.6663.

Education

1992 – 1993Post-doctoral Fellow, AT&T Bell Laboratories, NJ, USA.
Learning and Vision Algorithms​ | ​Larry Jackel and Yann LeCun’s group



1991 – 1992Post-doctoral Fellow, MIT, MA, USA.
NSERC scholarship | Statistical Learning / Sequential Data
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences | Michael I. Jordan’s Group
1988 – 1991Ph.D. in Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal
NSERC scholarship | Neural Networks and Markovian Models
1986 – 1988M.Sc. in Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal
Speech Recognition with Statistical Methods
1982 – 1986B.Eng. in Computer Engineering, Honours, McGill University, Montreal

Titles and distinctions (full list)

2019 – presentCo-Chair of the AI Advisory Council, government of Canada
2018 – presentCo-founder and Scientific Director, Mila, the Quebec AI Institute
2018 – 2023Chair, CIFAR AI (CCAI) ($1.25M)
2016 – presentScientific Director, IVADO, the Data Valorization Institute
2016-2023


Recipient of CFREF Grant ($93.6M), 2016 – 2023
Leading applicant for Data Serving Canadians: Deep Learning and Optimization for the Knowledge Revolution; the largest grant ever received at U.Montreal.
2014 – presentCo-director, CIFAR LMB (Learning in Machines in Brains) program
Previously called NCAP and originally led by Geoff Hinton, this program funded the initial breakthrough in deep learning.
2013 – presentco-founder and member of the board of ICLR (International Conference on Learning Representations)
2012 – 2013Awards CommitteeCanadian Association for Computer Science
Also member of the NeurIPS 2012 and ICML 2016 committees for best paper awards, and NeurIPS committees for choosing the next program chairs 2013-2018.
2010 – presentMember of the advisory board, Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Foundation (Formerly NIPS)
2009General Chair, NeurIPS
NeurIPS is a very high-level conference – the most important in the field (> 1000 submissions) – with reviewing and acceptance criteria comparing favorably to the best journals (acceptance rate between 20% and 25%). Having 56 papers published in NeurIPS over the years puts me among the most prolific contributors to the NeurIPS community.
2008Program Co-Chair, NeurIPS 2008
2005 – 2015Industrial Research ChairNSERC, 2005 – 2015
2004 – presentSenior FellowCIFAR (Canadian Institute For Advanced Research)
2000 – 2019Canada Research Chair on Statistical Learning Algorithms
Tier 2, 2000-2005 ; Tier 1, 2006 – 2019
1999 – 2009Member of the board, the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques (UdeM)
1993Founder and Scientific Director, Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute
Formerly the LISA (founded 1993), Mila brings together the researchers of Université de Montréal and McGill University in an independent non-profit organization. With 300 researchers, including 15 faculty, it is the largest academic center for deep learning research in the world, yielding pioneering papers in the field, including the introduction of deep learning (2006), curriculum learning (2009), showing the power of ReLUs for deeper nets (2011), and the breakthroughs brought by GANs and neural machine translation (2014).

Prizes and Awards

2019A. M. Turing Award 2018, Association for Computing Machinery, awarded jointly with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun
2019Killam Prize for natural sciences, Canada Council for the Arts
2019IEEE CIS Neural Networks Pioneer Award, IEEE Computational Intelligence Society
2019Prix d’excellence FRQNT, Fonds de recherche du Quebec – Nature et technologies
2018Lifetime Achievement Award, Canadian AI Association
2018Medal of the 50th Anniversary of the Ministry of International Relations and Francophonie
2017Marie-Victorin Quebec Prize
Highest distinction in the sciences for the province of Québec
2017Radio-Canada’s Scientist of the Year
2017Member of the Royal Society of Canada
2017Officer of the Order of Canada
2015La Recherche 10 Discoveries That Changed Science 2015 For work on neural networks local minima.
2009ACFAS Urgel-Archambault Prize