Yoshua Bengio is one of the world's leading artificial intelligence experts.
After earning his PhD in Computer Science from McGill University, Bengio pursued his postdoctoral studies at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at AT&T Bell Labs in the US.
He is Full Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at Université de Montréal, and Head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA). He is also Co-Director of the Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning Algorithms and NSERC-Ubisoft Industrial Chair.
Bengio is Editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research and Associate Editor for the Neural Computation journal.
He is the Scientific Director of the Institute for Data Valorization (IVADO), a strategic alliance between Université de Montréal and its two large affiliate schools, École Polytechnique and École des hautes études commerciales (HEC). IVADO has also partnered with McGill University. In 2016, the Federal Government awarded IVADO $93.5 M over seven years. This marks the largest grant in Université de Montréal’s history since its establishment at the end of the 19th century.
In fall 2016, along with Jean-François Gagné and Nicolas Chapado, Bengio launched a start-up incubator in artificial intelligence called Élément AI. Through their world-renowned work on learning algorithms, Bengio and his team are attempting to provide computers with the capacity to acquire operational knowledge by learning from examples.
With over 300 scientific publications to his name, Bengio is a pioneer of deep learning — a set of automatic learning methods in artificial intelligence.
His main research ambition is to understand principles of learning that yield intelligence. He is an internationally sought-after speaker.
