The Godfathers of the AI Boom Win Computing's Highest Honor

In the late 1980s, Canadian master's student Yoshua Bengio became captivated by an unfashionable idea. A handful of artificial intelligence researchers was trying to craft software that loosely mimicked how networks of neurons process data in the brain, despite scant evidence it would work. "I fell in love with the idea that we could both understand the principles of how the brain works and also construct AI," says Bengio, now a professor at the University of Montreal. More than 20 years later, the tech industry fell in love with that idea, too. Neural networks are behind the recent bloom of progress in AI that has enabled projects such as self-driving cars and phone bots practically indistinguishable from people.