How To Join The Applied AI Revolution

Have you ever wondered whom to thank for some of the modern conveniences you might have started taking for granted, like Siri, Cortana or Alexa (assuming you agree these are conveniences)? The people at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) decided to thank Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun in April of this year by honoring them with the Turing Award for their contributions to deep learning and neural networks. These contributions are put to use every time you log into your smartphone using fingerprint or facial recognition or when you use Google Photos or a voice assistant, and likely every time you use Amazon, Netflix, Facebook or Instagram. The advances in automatic language translation and autonomous cars in recent years arguably wouldn't have progressed as rapidly had it not been for the contributions of these three researchers. All of that is still an understatement of their contributions to artificial intelligence (AI).