This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and others published papers on neural networks and handwriting recognition

This week in The History of AI at AIWS.net – Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and others in November 1998 published a series of papers. They discussed neural networks and handwriting recognition, as well as backpropagation. One of them can be read here.

Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, most notable for his works on neural networks and deep learning. He is an influential scholar, being one of the most cited computer scientists. In the 1990s and 2000s, he helped make deep advancements in the field of deep learning. Bengio is also a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Yann LeCun is a French computer scientist, renowned for his work on deep learning and artificial intelligence. He is also notable for contributions to robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professor of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU. In addition, LeCun is the Chief AI Scientist for Facebook.

This is recognised by the HAI initiative for further pioneering works in artificial intelligence, notably in neural networks and backpropagation. Furthermore, both Bengio and LeCun were recipients of the 2018 ACM Turing Award for their contributions to deep learning, which is an aspect of artificial intelligence. Thus, the initiative considers this an important event in AI history.