1. Yoshua Bengio is a professor at the Universite de Montreal and scientific director of the AI institute MILA.
21 Facts About Yoshua Bengio
1. 2.
Yoshua Bengio is the most-cited computer scientist globally, and the most-cited living scientist across all fields.
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Yoshua Bengio was born in France to a Jewish family who had emigrated to France from Morocco.
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Yoshua Bengio received his Bachelor of Science degree, MSc and PhD from McGill University.
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Yoshua Bengio is the brother of Samy Yoshua Bengio, an influential computer scientist working with neural networks, who is currently Senior Director of AI and ML Research at Apple.
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The Yoshua Bengio brothers lived in Morocco for a year during their father's military service there.
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Yoshua Bengio's father, Carlo Bengio was a pharmacist and a playwright; he ran a Sephardic theater company in Montreal that performed pieces in Judeo-Arabic.
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Yoshua Bengio's mother, Celia Moreno, was an actor in the 1970s in the Moroccan theater scene led by Tayeb Seddiki.
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Yoshua Bengio studied economics in Paris, and then in Montreal in 1980 she co-founded with artist Paul St-Jean l'Ecran humain, a multimedia theater troupe.
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Thanks to a 2019 article on a novel RNN architecture, Yoshua Bengio has an Erdos number of 3.
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In October 2016, Yoshua Bengio co-founded Element AI, a Montreal-based artificial intelligence incubator that turns AI research into real-world business applications.
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Yoshua Bengio sold its operations to ServiceNow in November 2020, with Bengio remaining at ServiceNow as an advisor.
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Yoshua Bengio currently serves as scientific and technical advisor for Recursion Pharmaceuticals and scientific advisor for Valence Discovery.
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In March 2023, following concerns raised by AI experts about the existential risk from artificial general intelligence, Yoshua 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".
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In May 2023, Yoshua Bengio stated in an interview to BBC that he felt "lost" over his life's work.
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Yoshua Bengio raised his concern about "bad actors" getting hold of AI, especially as it becomes more sophisticated and powerful.
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Yoshua Bengio called for better regulation, product registration, ethical training, and more involvement from governments in tracking and auditing AI products.
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Yoshua 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.
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In 2017, Yoshua Bengio was named an Officer of the Order of Canada.
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Together with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio won the 2018 Turing Award.
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In 2023, Yoshua Bengio was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honour, France's highest order of merit.