Artificial-intelligence pioneers win $1 million Turing Award

To learn who's taking home the Turing Award, people might turn to their trusted talking bots, like Siri or Alexa. Or, in fact, some of the very technology the three winners helped bring to life. Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun have earned what's often referred to as the Nobel Prize of the tech world for their pioneering work in artificial intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery announced Wednesday. The researchers, working both independently and together, helped advance the thinking and application of neural networks, the technology that gives computers the ability to recognize patterns, interpret language and glean insights from complex data. "Artificial intelligence is now one of the fastest-growing areas in all of science and one of the most talked-about topics in society," Cherri Pancake, president of the computing society, said in a statement.