Building AI Superclusters in Canada – Synced – Medium

The breakthrough came in 2006: Hinton led a published paper called A Fast Learning Algorithm for Deep Belief Nets, which first proposed the method of greedy layer-wise training for deep neural networks. In an competition run by ImageNet in 2012, Hinton's UofT team used convolutional neural networks (CNN) for image recognition application. Given the large pool of image datasets and the computation power of GPU processors, the team was on the right track, and their results redefined the field of computer vision. Two of Hinton's earliest correspondents were Yoshua Bengio from the University of Montreal and his own postdoc student Yan Lecun, who joined Hinton's UofT lab in 1987 and now leads AI research at Facebook. The accomplished trio is sometimes jokingly referred to as the "Canadian Mafia" of deep learning.