Four computer scientists, considered to be among the most important pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence, receive this year’s prestigious Spanish Princess of Asturias Prize in the science category. The prize goes to the British Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis as well as to the French Yann Le Cun and the Canadian Yoshua Bengio, according to the jury of the “Fundación Princesa de Asturias” in northern Spain.
As the jury emphasized, Geoffrey Hinton (74), Yann LeCun (61) and Yoshua Bengio (58) are considered “the fathers of a fundamental artificial intelligence technique, deep learning, based on the use of neural networks for speech recognition, for computer vision and for natural language processing”.
Hassabis is a neuroscientist and computer game and software developer who was also very successful as a chess player at a young age. He is CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, one of the world’s largest artificial intelligence research companies, launched in 2011 and acquired by Google in 2014 for approximately $400 million.
With DeepMind, the 45-year-old from London has “created a neural network model that combines the capabilities of an artificial neural network with the algorithmic power of a programmable computer,” it said.
Named after the Spanish heir apparent, the Princess of Asturias Awards are presented annually in eight categories and are each endowed with 50,000 euros. All winners will also receive a sculpture by Joan Miró. Crown Princess Leonor (16) and her father, King Felipe VI. (54) will present the prizes in Oviedo at the end of October.
Source: Krone
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