This year the Princess of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research dropped to four researchers who are experts in artificial intelligence: Geoffrey Hinton, Yann Le Cun, Yoshua Bengio s Demis Hassabis.
Hinton, LeCun and Bengio are considered the fathers of an essential artificial intelligence technique, the deep learning any deep learningbased on the use of neural networks for speech recognition, computer vision and natural language processing.
These neural networks aim to mimic the functioning of the human brain through algorithms that convert the biological learning process into mathematical sequences. It’s about machine learning from your own experience. With this technology, advances have been made in fields as diverse as object perception and machine translation.
In 1986, Hinton he invented the backpropagation algorithms, fundamental to the training of neural networks. With them, in 2012 he managed to create a convolutional neural network called AlexNetcomposed of 650,000 neurons and trained on 1.2 million images, it recorded only 26% errors in object recognition and halved the percentage of previous systems.
He made other contributions to artificial neural networks and their training, such as the co-creation of the Boltzmann machine, the Helmholtz machine and the so-called expert product. In 2021, he published a document on the arXiv prepress platform in which he presented GLOMan innovative project, still theoretical, that involves a new vector model to process and represent visual information in a neural network, which is still under development.
Character and text recognition
as for lessoncontributed to the development of the backpropagation algorithms that Hinton invented and in 1989 created LeNet-5a system for recognizing characters written on bank checks, which was a breakthrough in optical character recognition technology.
He later contributed to the development of the DJVu technology image compression, used by hundreds of websites and millions of users to access scanned documents on the Internet. He also worked on deep learning methods for document recognition, human-computer interaction, and speech recognition.
in your turn, Bengio made important contributions to probabilistic sequence models, also used for the speech and writing recognition and unsupervised learning. Currently, he studies more efficient algorithms in data representations, extracting pattern recognition and also allowing the understanding of more complex relationships and high-level concepts.
Hinton, LeCun and Bengio have already been recognized in 2018 with the Turing Awardthat many consider the ‘Nobel of computing’.
DeepMind Founder Award
For your part, Hassabis is CEO and co-founder of deep mindone of the largest artificial intelligence research companies in the world, created in 2011 and acquired in 2014 by Google.
With DeepMind, this British entrepreneur created a neural network model that combines the capabilities of an artificial neural network with the algorithmic power of a programmable computer.
Hassabis’ company linked the progress made in machine learning with the processes of deep learning and so-called reinforcement learning to create a new field of deep reinforcement learningan artificial intelligence system that opens the door to multiple applications in the study of numerous scientific disciplines.
In 2021, the DeepMind team was able to predict, with a very high degree of accuracy, the structure of more than 350,000 human proteins (44% of all known proteins). The data was made available to all laboratories around the world in the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database and the achievement was highlighted by the journal Science as a scientific discovery of that year.
“It is a great honor for me to receive the prestigious Princess of Asturias Award along with some of my brilliant scientific colleagues and on behalf of my incredible team, who have helped improve people’s lives and increase our understanding of the world through the invention of these new technologies. innovative technologies”, highlighted Hassabis when he learned that he had been one of the winners.