Collective Problem Solving with AI

For today’s episode, we’ll hear from AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio who is a Turing-award winning computer scientist, AI XPRIZE advisory board member, and one of the “godfathers of machine learning”. In a special recording from AI for Good, a global summit hosted by ITU and XPRIZE, Yoshua takes us on a deep dive into how machine learning is helping us in the fight against Covid-19. Yoshua pulls the curtains back on two AI projects, one around prediction of contagiousness, and a second on antiviral drug discovery. Both projects lead to a discussion about the need to change our economic and social structures to maximize collective well-being.

Yoshua Bengio is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts in artificial intelligence and a pioneer in deep learning. Following his studies in Montreal, culminating in a Ph.D. in computer science from McGill University, Professor Bengio did postdoctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.

Since 1993, Yoshua Bengio has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operational Research at the Université de Montréal. In addition to having held for its maximum duration a Canada Research Chair, he is also the founder and scientific director of Mila, the Quebec Institute of Artificial Intelligence, the world’s largest university-based research group in deep learning. In 2016 he also became the Scientific Director of IVADO and co-Chair of the Canada’s Advisory Council on AI in 2019.

His contribution to research is undeniable. In 2018, Yoshua Bengio is the computer scientist who collected the largest number of new citations in the world, thanks to his three books and some 500 publications.

His ultimate goal is to understand the principles that lead to intelligence through learning and his research has earned him multiple awards. In 2017, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, in addition to receiving the Prix Marie-Victorin and being named Scientist of the Year by Radio-Canada. In 2018, he was awarded the 50th Anniversary Medal by Quebec’s Ministère des Relations internationales et de la Francophonie and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian AI Association. In 2019, he was awarded the Killam Prize, the IEEE CIS Neural Networks Pioneer Award, as well as the ACM A.M. Turing Award, “the Nobel Prize of Computing”, jointly with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing. These honours reflect the profound influence of his work on the evolution of our society. Concerned about the social impacts of this new technology, he actively contributed to the development of the Montreal Declaration for Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence.

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