Yoshua Bengio

Scientific Director, MILA

Yoshua Bengio is the world-leading expert on deep learning and the author of the bestselling book on that topic. His research objective is to understand the mathematical and computational principles that give rise to intelligence through learning. He has contributed to a wide spectrum of machine learning areas and is well known for his theoretical results on recurrent neural networks, kernel machines, distributed representations, depth of neural architectures, and the optimization challenge of deep learning. His work was crucial in advancing how deep networks are trained, how neural networks can learn vector embeddings for words, how to perform machine translation with deep learning by taking advantage of an attention mechanism, and how to perform unsupervised learning with deep generative models. He is the author of three books and more than 300 publications, is among the most-cited Canadian computer scientists, and is or has been associate editor of the top journals in machine learning and neural networks.

Yoshua Bengio is a full-time Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the University of Montréal, Head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), Director of Scientific Programs of the Institute for Data Valorization (IVADO), Co-director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) program on Learning in Machines and Brains and Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning Algorithms.