Yoshua Bengio. Yoshua Bengio  (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian computer scientist, and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the AI institute MILA.

Bengio received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing", together with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, for their foundational work on deep learning. Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI". Bengio is the most-cited computer scientist globally (by both total citations and by h-index), and the most-cited living scientist across all fields (by total citations). In 2024, TIME Magazine included Bengio in its yearly list of the world's 100 most influential people.

Early life and education
Bengio was born in France to a Jewish family who had emigrated to France from Morocco. The family then relocated to Canada. He received his Bachelor of Science degree (electrical engineering), MSc (computer science) and PhD (computer science) from McGill University.

Bengio is the brother of Samy Bengio, also an influential computer scientist working with neural networks, who is currently Senior Director of AI and ML Research at Apple.

The Bengio brothers lived in Morocco for a year during their father's military service there. His father, Carlo Bengio was a pharmacist and a playwright; he ran a Sephardic theater company in Montreal that performed pieces in Judeo-Arabic. His mother, Célia Moreno, was an actor in the 1970s in the Moroccan theater scene led by Tayeb Seddiki. She studied economics in Paris, and then in Montreal in 1980 she co-founded with artist Paul St-Jean l’Écran humain, a multimedia theater troupe.

Career and research
After his PhD, Bengio was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT (supervised by Michael I. Jordan) and AT&T Bell Labs. Bengio has been a faculty member at the Université de Montréal since 1993, heads the MILA (Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms) and is co-director of the Learning in Machines & Brains program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, Bengio is considered by journalist Cade Metz to be one of the three people most responsible for the advancement of deep learning during the 1990s and 2000s. Among the computer scientists with an h-index of at least 100, Bengio was as of 2018 the one with the most recent citations per day, according to MILA. As of August 2024, he has the highest Discipline H-index (D-index, a measure of the research citations a scientist has received) of any computer scientist. Thanks to a 2019 article on a novel RNN architecture, Bengio has an Erdős number of 3.

In October 2016, Bengio co-founded Element AI, a Montreal-based artificial intelligence incubator that turns AI research into real-world business applications. The company sold its operations to ServiceNow in November 2020, with Bengio remaining at ServiceNow as an advisor.

Bengio currently serves as scientific and technical advisor for Recursion Pharmaceuticals and scientific advisor for Valence Discovery.

At the first AI Safety Summit in November 2023, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that Bengio would lead an international scientific report on the safety of advanced AI. The report was delivered at the AI Seoul Summit in May 2024, and covered issues such as the potential for cyber attacks and 'loss of control' scenarios.

Views on AI 
In March 2023, following concerns raised by AI experts about the existential risk from artificial general intelligence, Bengio signed an open letter from the Future of Life Institute calling for "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4". The letter has been signed by over 30,000 individuals, including AI researchers such as Stuart Russell and Gary Marcus.

In May 2023, Bengio stated in an interview to BBC that he felt "lost" over his life's work. He raised his concern about "bad actors" getting hold of AI, especially as it becomes more sophisticated and powerful. He called for better regulation, product registration, ethical training, and more involvement from governments in tracking and auditing AI products.

Speaking with the Financial Times in May 2023, Bengio said that he supported the monitoring of access to AI systems such as ChatGPT so that potentially illegal or dangerous uses could be tracked.  In July 2023, he published a piece in The Economist arguing that "the risk of catastrophe is real enough that action is needed now."

Bengio co-authored a letter with Geoffrey Hinton and others in support of SB 1047, a California AI safety bill that would require companies training models which cost more than $100 million to perform risk assessments before deployment. They claimed the legislation was the "bare minimum for effective regulation of this technology."

Awards and honours
In 2017, Bengio was named an Officer of the Order of Canada. The same year, he was nominated Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and received the Marie-Victorin Quebec Prize. Together with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, Bengio won the 2018 Turing Award.

In 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 2022, he received the Princess of Asturias Award in the category "Scientific Research" with his peers Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis. In 2023, Bengio was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honour, France's highest order of merit. 

In August 2023, he was appointed to a United Nations scientific advisory council on technological advances.

He was recognized as a 2023 ACM Fellow.

In 2024, TIME Magazine included Bengio in its yearly list of the 100 most influential people globally. In the same year, he was awarded VinFuture Prize's grand prize along with Geoffrey E. Hinton, Yann LeCun, Jen-Hsun Huang and Fei-Fei Li for pioneering advancements in neural networks and deep learning algorithms.

Publications 
 Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville: Deep Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning), MIT Press, Cambridge (USA), 2016. .
 
 Léon Bottou, Patrick Haffner, Paul G. Howard, Patrice Simard, Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun: High Quality Document Image Compression with DjVu, In: Journal of Electronic Imaging, Band 7, 1998, S. 410–425 
 Bengio, Yoshua; Schuurmans, Dale; Lafferty, John; Williams, Chris K. I. and Culotta, Aron (eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 22 (NIPS'22), December 7th–10th, 2009, Vancouver, BC, Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Foundation, 2009
 Y. Bengio, Dong-Hyun Lee, Jorg Bornschein, Thomas Mesnard, Zhouhan Lin: Towards Biologically Plausible Deep Learning, arXiv.org, 2016
 Bengio contributed one chapter to Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it, Packt Publishing, 2018, , by the American futurist Martin Ford.

References

1964 births
Living people
Canadian artificial intelligence researchers
Canadian computer scientists
Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
2023 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
French emigrants to Quebec
French people of Moroccan-Jewish descent
Canadian people of Moroccan-Jewish descent
Canadian Sephardi Jews
Machine learning researchers
McGill University Faculty of Engineering alumni
Academic staff of the Université de Montréal
Turing Award laureates
Jewish Canadian scientists
21st-century Mizrahi Jews
Canadian fellows of the Royal Society
Officers of the Order of Canada
AI safety scientists