Princess of Asturias Award lauds advances in AI for 2022 edition

Oviedo, Spain, Jun 15 (EFE).- The 2022 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research recognized the work of experts in artificial intelligence Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio and Demis Hassabis, the organization announced Wednesday.

The jury, chaired by the Spanish physicist Pedro Manuel Echenique, celebrated the impact of Brits Hinton and Hassabis, Canadian Bengio and Franco-American LeCun’s contributions to the advancement of AI and the field’s “full integration” in society.

“Their contributions to the development of ‘deep learning’ have led to major advances in techniques as diverse as speech recognition, natural language processing, object perception, machine translation, strategy optimization, the analysis of protein structure, medical diagnosis and many others,” the organization said.

“Its current and future impact on the progress of society may be described as extraordinary,” the statement added.

Hinton, LeCun and Bengio are considered the fathers of the deep learning technique, which is based on the use of neural networks for voice recognition, computer vision and natural language processing.

Hassabis is the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, one of the largest artificial intelligence research companies in the world that pioneered a neural network model that combines the capabilities of an artificial neural network with the algorithmic power of a programmable computer.

The four scientists were put forward for the award by the president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence at Cornell University (United States), Bart Selman. EFE

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