Yoshua Bengio

Recognized worldwide as one of the leading experts in artificial intelligence, Yoshua Bengio is best known for his pioneering work in deep learning, which earned him the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, often called the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.

He is a Full Professor at the Université de Montréal and the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila – Quebec AI Institute. He co-directs the CIFAR Learning in Machines & Brains program, serves as Scientific Director of IVADO, and in 2025 launched LawZero, a nonprofit dedicated to building safe and transparent AI systems.

Bengio’s contributions have earned him numerous honors, including Fellow of the Royal Society of London and Canada, Knight of the French Legion of Honor, and Officer of the Order of Canada. He is also the first AI researcher to surpass one million citations on Google Scholar.

A committed advocate for responsible AI, Bengio helped draft the Montreal Declaration for the Responsible Development of AI and continues to champion AI safety, ethics, and ensuring that AI benefits society as a whole.

Born in France to a Jewish family that had previously immigrated from Morocco, Yoshua Bengio earned his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, followed by a Master of Science (MSc) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science, all from McGill University.

After completing his Ph.D., Bengio further refined his expertise as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, under the mentorship of Michael I. Jordan, and at AT&T Bell Labs. In 1993, he returned to Canada and joined the Université de Montréal, where he has since established himself as a global leader in artificial intelligence research. At the university, he serves as the head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) and as co-director of the Learning in Machines & Brains program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Bengio is widely recognized as one of the founding figures of modern deep learning, alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun. His pioneering research throughout the 1990s and 2000s helped propel deep learning from a theoretical concept into the transformative technology that underpins today’s AI applications. His work has been highly influential, consistently earning high citation rates and shaping the direction of AI research worldwide.

Beyond academia, Bengio has actively contributed to the translation of AI research into practical applications. He co-founded Element AI, a Montreal-based company focused on bringing advanced AI research into real-world business solutions. Following the company’s acquisition by ServiceNow, Bengio has continued to advise on AI strategy and development. He also serves as a scientific advisor to Recursion Pharmaceuticals and Valence Discovery, supporting the responsible integration of AI in science and industry.

Bengio's commitment to advancing AI extends beyond academia and industry. He currently serves as a scientific and technical advisor for Recursion Pharmaceuticals and as a scientific advisor for Valence Discovery. His dedication to responsible AI development is evident through his involvement in the Montreal Declaration, which seeks to guide ethical AI practices.

A committed advocate for ethical and responsible AI, Bengio played a central role in the Montreal Declaration for Responsible AI, which provides guidelines for the development of AI aligned with human values and social good.

Bengio’s groundbreaking contributions have earned him numerous honors, including the A.M. Turing Award (2018)—often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” shared with Hinton and LeCun. He is also an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. Other notable awards include the Killam Prize for Natural Sciences (2019), the Government of Québec Marie-Victorin Award (2017), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian AI Association (2018), the Prix d’excellence FRQNT (2019), and the Medal of the 50th Anniversary of the Ministry of International Relations and Francophonie (2018).

Published work

In the book "Deep Learning" co-authored with Ian Goodfellow and Aaron Courville (2016), Bengio delves into the foundations of deep learning, providing a comprehensive guide to this transformative field.

One of his seminal contributions to machine translation is the paper "Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate" (2015), co-authored with Dzmitry Bahdanau and Kyunghyun Cho. This work introduced a groundbreaking approach to neural machine translation, using attention mechanisms to improve the quality and accuracy of translation.

Bengio's research extends to optimization challenges in deep learning, as seen in "Identifying and attacking the saddle point problem in high-dimensional non-convex optimization" (2014), co-authored with Yann Dauphin and others, which addresses the optimization challenges inherent in training deep neural networks.

He also explored the structural properties of deep neural networks in "On the Number of Linear Regions of Deep Neural Networks" (2014), co-authored with Guido Montufar and others, shedding light on the complexity of these networks.

Bengio's contributions to the generative aspects of deep learning are evident in "Generative Adversarial Networks" (2014), co-authored with Ian Goodfellow and others, which introduced the concept of generative adversarial networks (GANs) that have since become a vital tool in AI research.

Yoshua Bengio's vision centers on advancing artificial intelligence to benefit humanity while ensuring its development remains safe and ethical. He aims to uncover the fundamental principles that give rise to intelligence through machine learning, seeking to build AI systems that understand the world, make informed decisions, and serve society positively. Bengio believes in creating more intelligent machines that can learn from examples and generalize knowledge to new situations, ultimately improving various sectors including healthcare, finance, and technology.

Bengio is deeply committed to the responsible development of AI. He envisions a future where AI is developed with safety as a primary consideration, not an afterthought. His goal is to ensure that advanced AI systems are aligned with human values and do not pose existential risks. Through his work with LawZero and the International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI, Bengio advocates for rigorous safety standards, transparent AI development, and international cooperation in managing AI risks.

He supports democratizing access to AI technology and preventing its concentration among a small elite of companies and countries. Bengio believes in making AI benefits accessible to all and fostering collaboration between academia, industry, and government to create an AI ecosystem that prioritizes societal good over profit maximization. His vision includes building AI systems that are honest, capable of detecting deception, and designed to prevent misuse by bad actors.

Bengio also emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly between neuroscience and machine learning. Through programs like CIFAR's Learning in Machines & Brains, he promotes the exchange of ideas between understanding biological intelligence and creating artificial intelligence, believing this cross-pollination will accelerate progress in both fields.

Yoshua Bengio has received extensive recognition for his pioneering contributions to artificial intelligence and deep learning:

Major Awards:

• 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award (with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun) – Often called the "Nobel Prize of Computing," awarded for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that made deep neural networks a critical component of computing
• 2019 Killam Prize in Natural Sciences – One of Canada's most prestigious awards for outstanding career achievements
• 2019 Herzberg Gold Medal – Canada's highest scientific honor
• 2022 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research (with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun)
• 2024 VinFuture Prize Grand Prize (with Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Jensen Huang, and Fei-Fei Li) for pioneering advancements in neural networks and deep learning
• 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (with Bill Dally, Geoffrey Hinton, John Hopfield, Yann LeCun, Jensen Huang, and Fei-Fei Li)

Honors and Fellowships:

• 2017 Officer of the Order of Canada
• 2017 Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
• 2020 Fellow of the Royal Society of London
• 2023 Knight of the French Legion of Honor
• 2023 ACM Fellow
• 2025 Officer of the National Order of Quebec
• 2025 Honorary Doctorate from McGill University

Additional Recognition:

• 2017 Government of Quebec Prix Marie-Victorin
• 2017 Radio-Canada Scientist of the Year
• 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award, Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association
• 2019 IEEE CIS Neural Networks Pioneer Award
• 2019 Prix d'excellence FRQNT
• 2024 TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World
• Canada Research Chair, Tier 2 (2000)
• Canada Research Chair, Tier 1 (2006-2019)
• Canada CIFAR AI Chair

Academic Impact:

• Most-cited computer scientist globally by total citations and h-index
• Most-cited living scientist across all fields by total citations
• First AI researcher to surpass one million Google Scholar citations (November 2025)
• Highest Discipline H-index (D-index) of any computer scientist as of August 2024

Leadership and Advisory Roles:

• Chair of the International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI
• Member of the UN's Scientific Advisory Board for Independent Advice on Breakthroughs in Science and Technology
• Member of the NeurIPS Foundation advisory board
• Co-Founder of the ICLR (International Conference on Learning Representations) in 2013

Bengio's work has fundamentally transformed the field of artificial intelligence, enabling breakthroughs in computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, and robotics. His contributions continue to shape the development of AI technologies used by billions of people worldwide.