AI is now integrated into our daily lives. Siri, Amazon, Facebook and many others already rely on narrow (or weak) AI, focused on specific tasks - like speech recognition, image filtering etc. The AI revolution is already here.
While there are many entrepreneurs hogging the AI limelight by investing into the field, the real heroes are the academics who helped lay down the foundations for AI and Machine Learning to flourish. Here we have a look at 5 of the most influential personalities in the field today.
Andrew Ng
Co-founder of Google Brain and Coursera, Chief Scientist at Baidu, Director of the Stanford AI Lab - Andrew Ng's Resume reads like a Machine Learning Researcher's dream.
Born in the UK to immigrant parents from Hong Kong, he spent his early years in Hong Kong and Singapore. He has spent most of his professional life in the United States where he currently resides. He currently runs Landing AI, which provides SaaS based AI products to a variety of industries.
About the dangers of AI, he famously had this to say,
"Worrying about AI evil superintelligence today is like worrying about overpopulation on the planet Mars. We haven't even landed on the planet yet!"
Andrej Karpathy
A relatively new entrant in this list, Andrej Karpathy only received his PhD in Deep Learning from Stanford in 2015. His advisor Fei Fei Li is another stalwart in the community. After working at OpenAI for only two years, he joined Tesla as the Director of AI and Autopilot Vision at Tesla.
It is his latest position at Tesla that has earned him widespread acclaim, as he has spearheaded the Autopilot from an idea to reality in a few short years. His talks and presentations on Autopilot have garnered a lot of attention due to the sheer scale of the task and are a must watch for anyone interested in Self Driving Technology.
Yann LeCun
Founding father of Convolution Nets, creator of an image compression format - DjVu and a co-creator of the programming language - Lush, Yann LeCun received the 2018 Turing Award (often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing"), together with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, for their work on deep learning.
A French Scientist known for his work on OCR and Computer Vision, he currently serves as the VP and Chief AI Scientist at Facebook. He is also a Professor of Computer Science at New York University.
Geoffrey Hinton
Known as one of the Godfathers of Deep Learning ( others being Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton ), Hinton had actually been working with deep learning since the 1980s, but its effectiveness had been limited by a lack of data and computational power. In 2012, he along-with 2 colleagues blew open the Deep Learning field by winning the ImageNet competition by a staggering 10.8% using this approach.
He currently divides his time working for Google Brain and the University of Toronto.
Yoshua Bengio
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), Yoshua Bengio received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, together with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.
Born in France to Moroccan parents, he immigrated to Canada where he received most of his education and where he currently lives. He serves as an advisor to multiple startups in the AI sphere.