By Avraham David Sherwood
The Editor in Chief
The world’s one of most renowned association of AI, the AAAI or Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence has announced the election of ten AAAI 2020 Fellows and that also includes our Deep Learning pioneers and the 2018 Turing Award Winners the Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio.
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence launched this Fellows Program in 1990 to annually honor individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of AI.
Generally, members who have been active in the field for a decade or more are eligible for selection. The AAAI is an international scientific society devoted to promotes research in, and responsible use of AI.
The announcements came in advance of the Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20), a top-tier AI gathering that will be held February 7–12, 2020 at the Hilton New York Midtown, New York, USA.
The association aims to increase public understanding of artificial intelligence (AI), improve the teaching and training of AI practitioners, and provide guidance for research planners and funders concerning the importance and potential of current AI developments and future directions.
Yoshua Bengio is Professor of Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, Université de Montréal, and Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning Algorithms. He was one of the first to combine neural networks with probabilistic models of sequences, which has been extended to apply to speech recognition tasks. The well-known concept of word-embedding – a language modeling and feature learning paradigm which aims to map vocabularies to vectors was also introduced by him. Furthermore, he is one of the contributors on generative adversarial networks (GANs), a revolutionary methods for the application of machine translation, image generation, audio synthesis etc.
His research in Montreal helped to drive the progress of systems that aim to understand natural language and technology that can generate fake photos that are indistinguishable from the real thing.
Bengio also works with Yann LeCun on computer vision breakthroughs when they were at Bell Labs, went on to apply neural networks to natural language processing, leading to big advances in machine translation.
Currently, Bengio is a professor at the University of Montreal and the science director of both Mila (Quebec’s AI Institute) and the Institute for Data Valorization. More recently, he has worked on a method best known for enabling neural networks to create completely novel, but highly realistic, images.
Yann LeCun is well known for his work on optical character recognition and computer vision using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and he is a founding father of convolutional nets.
He developed the convolutional neural networks and was the first to train neural networks for handwritten digits recognition in the 1980s and contributed to an early version of the back-propagation algorithm.
He is also one of the main creators of the DjVu image compression technology (together with Léon Bottou and Patrick Haffner). He co-developed the Lush programming language with Léon Bottou.
Yann LeCun is Scientific Director of artificial intelligence for Facebook and professor at New York University.
LeCun developed and grow the mindblowing capabilities of neural networks and make them more powerful and useful. LeCun pioneered, including backpropagation and convolutional neural networks, have become ubiquitous in AI, and, by extension, in technology as a whole.
LeCun – together with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio are referred to by some as the “Godfathers of AI”.
The other new AAAI Fellows are:
- Cynthia Breazeal, a pioneer of social robotics and human–robot interaction; William T. Freeman, a computer vision pioneer.
- Radhika Nagpal, co-founder of Root Robotics Company.
- Natasha Noy, contributor of Protégé ontology editor, the Prompt alignment tool and Google Dataset Search.
- Martha Palmer, contributor of verb semantic and creator of ontological resources such as PropBank and VerbNet.
- Dragomir R. Radev, secretory of ACL and and associate editor of JAIR.
- Thomas Schiex, pioneer of constraint satisfaction problem on computing biology.
- Journal Sylvie Thiebaux co-editor in chief of Artificial Intelligence Journal.
