10 European experts who have been paving the way to modern AI

When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton famously replied, "Because that's where the money is". And so much of artificial antelligence evolved in the United States – because that's where the computers were. However with Europe's strong educational institutions, the path to advanced AI technologies has been cleared by European computer scientists, neuroscientists, and engineers – many of whom were later poached by US universities and companies. From backpropagation to Google Translate, deep learning, and the development of more advanced GPUs permitting faster processing and rapid developments in AI over the past decade, some of the greatest contributions to AI have come from European minds. Modern AI can be traced back to the work of the English mathematician Alan Turing, who in early 1940 designed the bombe – an electromechanical precursor to the modern computer (itself based on previous work by Polish scientists) that broke the German military codes in World War II.