This week, the Association of Computing Machinery announced the winners for its prestigious Turing Award. The Turing award is an annual prize often referred to as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science and named after Alan Turing who is recognized for laying the theoretical foundations for computer science in the WW2 era. This year it was awarded to three men who are considered the pioneers of the deep learning field within the field of AI or artificial intelligence. The award comes with $1 million in prize money funded by Google. This year’s three winners were computer scientists Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun. Here’s a post from the Washington Post that discusses their win.
Their work from the early 2000s practically founded the fields of neural networks and deep learning. These technologies form the basis for many modern technologies from your personal assistant to self driving cars.
As the name suggests, neural networks mimic the connections between neurons in a brain in order to process data and generate desired output. I won’t be able to do this concept justice here, especially since my understanding of neural networks is loose at best. So, I recommend you check out this big article; hopefully something will stick.
Deep learning is another niche part of AI, very closely related to neural networks. In fact, neural networks are often implemented to carry out deep learning which is why you’ll often see them mentioned together. Deep learning entails giving a network a bunch of raw data and telling it what you expect out of each set of that data. Then the system will sort through all the input and desired output to learn to understand patterns between the two. Once the system has “learned” sufficiently, the programmer can give it data that it has never seen before and test its ability to respond properly. This is how computer vision works, where a computer system can recognize objects in pictures. You can already see that in action in the photo gallery on your phone because it probably has a feature where you can see all your pictures that contain a certain person or pet.
These technologies have proven to be integral to the development of all kinds of our modern technology. If you want to read more about how their work applies to our modern world, check out this article from the Verge which does a good job drawing on the relevance of their work.
I think this was a great call on behalf of the ACM (which also happens to be a club here on campus if you’re interested in computer science) because the work of these three men will prove to be foundational to the next several decades of computer science.
