Madrid. Pioneers in artificial intelligence and its application in everyday life, the Frenchman Yann LeCun, the Canadian Yoshua Bengio and the British Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis, were awarded this Wednesday in Spain with the Princess of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research.
LeCun, Bengio and Hinton “are considered the fathers of an essential artificial intelligence technique”, while Hassabis has been key in its application in “numerous scientific disciplines”, pointed out the jury of this award convened by the Princess of Asturias Foundation, the heiress to the Spanish throne.
“His contributions to the development of deep learning (‘Deep Learning’) represent a great advance in techniques as diverse as voice recognition, natural language processing, object perception, machine translation” or medical diagnoses, indicated the minutes.
Due to the breadth of the disciplines in which its advances are applied, “its current and future impact on the progress of society can be described as extraordinary,” added the jury.
For their contributions in the field of artificial intelligence, LeCun, Hinton and Bengio won the Turing Prize in 2018, considered the Nobel Prize for computer scientists.
The Princess of Asturias Awards, instituted in 1981, are endowed with 50,000 euros (about 52,400 dollars) and a sculpture designed by the late Catalan artist Joan MirĂ³.
Recognize an image or predict a protein
Hinton was the creator in 1986 of the so-called backpropagation algorithms, tools with which he managed to conceive, in 2012, a neural network, called AlexNet, capable of recognizing objects with just 26% errors.
LeCun was based on the backpropagation algorithms to manufacture, in 1989, LeNet5, a system that allowed to recognize with enough certainty, for example, characters written on bank checks.
More recently, he was one of the promoters of an image compression system that allows scanned documents to be viewed on the internet, a technology used by millions of people every day.
For his part, Bengio specialized in probabilistic models of sequences, which over time have made it possible to perfect speech and handwriting recognition.
Lastly, in 2010 Hassabis founded DeepMind, a Google subsidiary that developed a new artificial intelligence system applicable to research, which managed, for example, to predict “the structure of more than 350,000 human proteins (44% of all known),” states the statement from the Princess of Asturias Foundation.
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