The famous researcher Yoshua Bengio, considered one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence, will enter the dictionary The Illustrated Petit Larousse. This is a new honor for the Quebec researcher, who has already accumulated a long list of awards.
Yoshua Bengio is a “Canadian computer scientist” born in 1964 in Paris, can we read in the pages of the new edition of the dictionary.
“This precursor of artificial neural networks and deep learning has developed machine learning technology used in voice recognition of telephones and language translation. It is also interested in the issues raised by the applications of artificial intelligence”, will he also be registered. the deep learning is, according to Larousse“a technology based on artificial neural networks allowing a machine to learn by itself”.
The scientific director of the Mila research institute and professor at the University of Montreal welcomes this news “with a little disbelief”, he confessed to a small committee of journalists, saying he was honored despite everything.
To select the personalities who will obtain a place in the dictionary, those in charge of the Little Larousse are based on four criteria, which are “the notoriety of the person in France, in French-speaking countries and in the world, as well as the longevity, legitimacy and accessibility of his work, his actions or his discoveries”, mentioned in the press release.
Cascading rewards
In the entry on Mr. Bengio, the dictionary also mentions his obtaining the prestigious Turing Prize in 2018 alongside researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun. But this is far from being his only reward.
This year, Yoshua Bengio received the French Legion of Honor as well as the Princess of Asturias Prize, one of the most prestigious in the Spanish-speaking world – two prizes which make him particularly “warm to the heart”, given his French roots and Spanish. The grandparents of this native of France, born of Moroccan parents, were from Sephardic families speaking Spanish.
“All these prizes, I would not have imagined them a few years ago. It always feels good to have these recognitions,” he says, while emphasizing the importance of remaining humble in these situations. Because scientific advances are not only the fruit of a handful of people, they are rather based on an entire community of researchers and students, Mr. Bengio points out.
On entering The Little Larousse iillustrated, Yoshua Bengio joins other Quebec personalities, such as the late surgeon Lucille Teasdale and the endocrinologist Michel Chrétien. About 300 Canadians, including some 30 Quebecers, appear in the pages of the illustrated book.