Deep learning is a quintessentially'hot topic'. It is surrounded by hype, often referenced and not discussed as thoroughly as it should be.

IMAGE: Yoshua Bengio, Co-recipient of the ACM A.M. Turing Award, will present his Turing Lecture at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum on September 23, 2019. ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today announced that Yoshua Bengio, co-recipient of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, will present his Turing Award Lecture, "Deep Learning for AI," at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum on September 23 in Heidelberg, Germany. Bengio is a professor at the University of Montreal and Scientific Director at Mila, Quebec's Artificial Intelligence Institute. He received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton, VP and Engineering Fellow of Google, and Yann LeCun, VP and Chief AI Scientist at Facebook. Bengio, Hinton and LeCun were recognized for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.

It is fall in Heidelberg and the leaves on the trees are already turning. This is the fifth year of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/) and it continues to be a highlight of the year for me and for about 250 others who participate. This year, computer science was heavily represented. There were fewer mathematicians, but they made up for smaller numbers by their extraordinary qualifications. A new cohort of laureates was added this year: recipients of the ACM Prize for Computing.a

Just five years ago, artificial intelligence-enabled computers could barely recognize images fed to them, much less analyze them anything like people can. But suddenly, they've turned the tables. "In 2011 their error rate was 26 percent," says Jeff Dean, chief of the Google Brain project, which along with other tech giants has helped lead a recent revolution in image recognition as well as speech recognition and self-driving cars. Now, he says, computers' ability to view and analyze images (pictured) exceeds what human eyes can do. "If you'd have told me that would be a possible just a few years ago, I would've never believed you," Dean said during an appearance at a research event in Heidelberg, Germany.

Experts discuss the costs and benefits created by developments brought on by Artificial Intelligence. In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has established itself at the forefront of technological innovation. That is precisely why AI is the focus of the Hot Topic at the 4th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF), 'AI: From Lofty Dream to Technology Driver', this September 20 at the New University in Heidelberg. The session is comprised of a panel discussion with leading researchers debating the current scientific trends in AI and its applications. That is followed by a broader discussion that dives into how the developments in AI affect our lives and society.