AAAI 2020 A Turning Point for Deep Learning?

This is an updated version. The Godfathers of AI and 2018 ACM Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio shared a stage in New York on Sunday night at an event organized by the Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2020). The trio of researchers have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing, and in individual talks and a panel discussion they discussed their views on current challenges facing deep learning and where it should be heading. Introduced in the mid 1980s, deep learning gained traction in the AI community the early 2000s. The year 2012 saw the publication of the CVPR paper Multi-column Deep Neural Networks for Image Classification, which showed how max-pooling CNNs on GPUs could dramatically improve performance on many vision benchmarks; while a similar system introduced months later by Hinton and a University of Toronto team won the large-scale ImageNet competition by a significant margin over shallow machine learning methods. These events are regarded by many as the beginning of a deep learning revolution that has transformed AI.