Exponential Trust Times
Who knows the AI Researchers?
The best Buzz word in this world for these last 5 years is “Artificial Intelligence”. Everyone is selling AI as the solution for all the problems, the miracle for the issues in our societies, the magic that will let us finally live a life of prosperity and happiness. Do I agree with all these expectations? I do believe that AI is a powerful technology that can create amazing solutions, products and services to make our lives easier. I do believe also that people should be more exponential thinkers to amplify the power of AI and control the potential risks and threats. AI is not a buzz word, it’s an efficient technology that is already upgrading our way of living but could AI challenge our way of thinking? Could AI learn from our values and reduce gender gaps, discrimination, bias everywhere, etc? Could AI help us from a societal perspective to make all kids achieve an education that let them thrive and not only survive? To achieve this, we need more AI researchers working in these aspects. So who are the AI Researchers?
Artificial intelligence was created by John McCarthy more than 60 years ago. These last years, we started recognizing more and more AI researchers. Many names came to my Mind: some of them that I met before in great AI scientific conferences and some others I enjoyed learning from their researchers and great passion for AI deep potential. In this article, we will have the pleasure to meet 18 scientists who are building technologies for hundreds of Millions of people in the world. We will try to share more information about their works in our videos in the unique AI Media of Trust “Exponential Trust Times”. Welcome to the Serie “Who knows the AI Researchers” with the most brilliant AI researchers : Ray Kurzweil, Gary Marcus, Yan Lecun, Yoshua Bengio, Andrew Ng, Fei-Fei Li, Daphne Koller, Demis Hassabis, Geoffrey Hinton, Adam Coates, Andrej Karpathy, Ian Goodfellow, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Nick Bostrom, Martin Ford, Jeff Dean, Joelle Pineau. For some of them, we will share a quote to invite our readers learning more about their thoughts in this Exponential Technologies Era.
Ray Kurzweil
Inventor | Futurist | Co-founder of Singularity University |
Director of Engineering at Google
Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions. Called “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes magazine, he was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” PBS selected him as one of the “sixteen revolutionaries who made America.” Ray was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Among Ray’s many honors, he received a Grammy Award for outstanding achievements in music technology; he is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, holds twenty-one honorary Doctorates, and honors from three U.S. presidents. Ray has written six national best-selling books, including New York Times best sellers The Singularity Is Near (2005) and How To Create A Mind (2012). He is Co-Founder and Chancellor of Singularity University and a Director of Engineering at Google heading up a team developing machine intelligence and natural language understanding.
Gary Marcus
Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU
Gary Marcus, scientist, bestselling author, entrepreneur, and the Founder of the machine learning startup Geometric Intelligence, acquired by Uber. He is a Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, with great researchers on human behavior, neuroscience, genetics, and artificial intelligence.
YanN Lecun
Chief AI Scientist at Facebook
Yann is known for being a founding father of convolutional nets as well as his work on optical character recognition and computer vision using convolutional neural networks. He was the Founding Director of the NYU Center for Data Science where he revolutionized unsupervised learning, and in 2018, Yann was a co-recipient of the ACM A.M. Turing Award along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Benigo for their work in deep learning.
Andrew Ng
Researcher at Stanford University | Founder of deeplearning.ai
Andrew co-founded and led Google Brain and was a VP and Chief Scientist of Baidu. In 2011, he led the development of Stanford University’s main MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform and taught an online Machine Learning class offered to over 100,000 students, leading to Coursera for which he is the Co-Chairman and Co-Founder as well as an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University.
Fei-Fei Li
Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University | Google Researcher
As the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, Dr. Li served as the Director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. In 2017, she was Vice President at Google with the role of Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. Dr. Li’s research covers machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and cognitive and computational neuroscience with nearly 200 scientific articles published in top-tier journals and conferences. Dr. Li is also the inventor of ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge.
Geoffrey Hinton
VP & Engineering Fellow at Google
Geoffrey is a famous AI researcher and contributor to the idea of deep learning having popularized backpropagation for training multi-layer neural networks in 1986. Considered the “godfather of deep learning,” Geoffrey divides his time working at Google Brain and the University of Toronto. His inventions are at the core of algorithms powering speech recognition, driverless cars, and image recognition.
Daphne Koller
Co-Founder of Coursera and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Pathology at Stanford.
Daphne has worked at the boundary of machine learning and biomedicine. Daphne co-founded Coursera with Andrew Ng. For her contributions to online education, she was recognized as one of Newsweek's 10 Most Important People in 2010, Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2012, and Fast Company's Most Creative People in 2014. After becoming the Chief Computing Officer at Calico in 2016, Daphne next joined insitro, a drug discovery startup.
Demis Hassabis
Founder and CEO of DeepMind – Google
Demis co-founded DeepMind at Google in 2010. He graduate from Cambridge University then completed a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience at UCL. As a Fellow of the Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts, Demis Hassabis was featured in 2017 in the Time 100 list of most influential people.
Adam Coates
AI Director at Apple
Adam received his PhD from Stanford University in 2012 and was the director of the Silicon Valley AI Lab at Baidu Research until September 2017. He is the AI Director at Apple.
Andrej Karpathy
AI Director at Tesla
At Tesla, Andrej leads the team responsible for all neural networks on the Autopilot. Previously, he was a Research Scientist at OpenAI working on deep learning in computer vision, generative modeling, and reinforcement learning. While earning a Ph.D. from Stanford under Fei-Fei Li, Andrej held two internships at Google to work on large-scale feature learning over YouTube videos as well as an internship at DeepMind working on deep reinforcement learning.
Ian Goodfellow
ML Director at Apple- former research scientist at Google Brain
Ian earned his B.S. and M.S. in computer science from Stanford University under Andrew Ng followed by a Ph.D. in machine learning from the Université de Montréal with Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville. He next joined Google as part of the Google Brain research team after which he joined the newly founded OpenAI institute before returning to Google Research in 2017. He is a ML Director at Apple.
Ruslan Salakhutdinov
AI Research Director at Apple
As a professor of Computer Science in the Machine Learning Department, School of Computer Science at CMU, Ruslan works in the field of statistical machine learning. His doctoral advisor was Geoffrey Hinton and, with many papers published on machine learning, Ruslan’s interests include deep learning, probabilistic graphical models, and large-scale optimization. He is known for developing Bayesian Program Learning and was the first director of AI Research hired at Apple.
Nick Bostrom
Professor at University of Oxford
Nick Bostrom is a Professor at University of Oxford. He is the director of Future of Humanity Institute and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Program. His researches are about the risks of developing artificial superintelligence and strategies on how to do so responsibly.
Yoshua Bengio
Co-founder of the Startup Elementai
He is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA). He is the Co-founder of the Canadian Startup Elementai that was sold for hundred of millions to an American Corporate, early 2021. He was awarded the 2018 ACM Turing Award for his work in deep learning.
Martin Ford
Futurist and Author
He is a futurist and the author of two books: The New York Times Bestselling Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future and The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future, as well as the founder of a Silicon Valley-based software development firm.
Jeff Dean
AI Chief at Google
Jeff joined Google in 1999 and today he is the Chief AI Division at Google. He oversees Google's research division and health division. His teams are working on systems for speech recognition, computer vision, language understanding, and other machine-learning tasks. He has co-designed/implemented many generations of Google's crawling, indexing, and query-serving systems and co-designed/implemented major pieces of Google's early advertising systems. He is a co-designer and co-implementor of Google's distributed computing infrastructure, including the MapReduce, BigTable, and Spanner systems, protocol buffers, the open-source TensorFlow system for machine learning, and a variety of internal and external libraries and developer tools.
Oriol Vinyals
Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind
Oriol Vinyals is a Principal Scientist at Google DeepMind, and a team lead of the Deep Learning group. His work focuses on Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Prior to joining DeepMind, Oriol was part of the Google Brain team. He holds a Ph.D. in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley and is a recipient of the 2016 MIT TR35 innovator award. His research has been featured multiple times at the New York Times, Financial Times, WIRED, BBC, etc., and his articles have been cited over 70000 times. One of his recent discussion with Lex Fridman is featured in this video.
Joelle Pineau
Director at Facebook AI Research
Joelle Pineau is a Director at Facebook AI Research in Montreal and an Associate Professor at McGill University where she co-directs the Reasoning and Learning Lab. She is a core academic member of Mila and a Canada CIFAR AI chairholder. Her research focuses on developing new models and algorithms for planning and learning in complex partially-observable domains. She also works on applying these algorithms to complex problems in robotics, health care, games and conversational agents. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Machine Learning Research and is Past-President of the International Machine Learning Society.
