Yoshua Bengio

Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist and professor at the Universite de Montreal, born in Paris, France, who is regarded as one of the pioneers of artificial neural networks and deep learning and who founded Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, serving as its scientific director until 2025. Bengio foundational research on training deep neural networks helped establish the techniques that underlie modern large-scale machine learning systems, and by the citation metrics reported in late 2025 he was described as the most-cited computer scientist globally by both total citations and h-index, and the most-cited living scientist across all fields by total citations, having passed one million Google Scholar citations that November. He shared the ACM Turing Award in 2018 with Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton for their foundational work on deep learning, earning the group the nickname the Godfathers of AI, and he now also serves as co-president and scientific director of the nonprofit LawZero. Bengio was named to Time magazine list of the world 100 most influential people in 2024 and received the Princess of Asturias Award in 2022 and the Legion of Honour in 2023.