Kareen Rispal, the French ambassador to Canada, presented the eminent AI researcher Yoshua Bengio with the insignia of Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur française on Monday, March 7, in recognition of his scientific contribution and his humanitarian commitment. The Quebec-based researcher is a pioneer in artificial intelligence. In fact, in March 2019, he received the Turing Award,considered the Nobel Prize for computer science, alongside his compatriot Yann LeCun and the British Geoffrey Hinton.

Yoshua Bengio was born on March 5, 1964 in Paris where his parents, of Moroccan origin, had come to study at the university. He arrived in Quebec at the age of 12 and obtained his PhD in computer science from McGill University in 1991. After postdoctoral studies at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he became a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at the University of Montreal in 1993. That same year, he founded MILA, the Institut québécois d’intelligence artificielle, for which he surrounded himself with professors from the universities of Montreal, McGill, Polytechnique and HEC in order to offer graduate students (masters, doctorate and postdoctorate) a place to pursue their studies in artificial intelligence in Montreal. He is the scientific director of the lab but also co-directs the Machine Learning, Biological Learning program at CIFAR as a principal investigator and is the scientific director of IVADO, the Institute for Data Valorization. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Canada and an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Sylvie Hamel, director of DIRO, a colleague of Yoshua Bengio, says that more than a quarter of the department’s faculty now work in AI and states:

“He is a researcher who is very generous and shares his laurels with the community. His vision was to make Montreal the Sillicon Valley of artificial intelligence and it’s coming!”

The common good above all

While Yan LeCun is in charge of AI research for Meta (the former Facebook) and Geoffrey Hinton is in charge of AI research for Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Yoshua Bengio prefers to stay in the academic world and has turned down some very attractive offers from the private sector. In an interview, he said:

“When you do research, what motivates you is something very intangible, something quite internal that makes you want to be good with your work, you want what you do to be used for the good of society. I could make a lot more money somewhere else, it’s outrageous even what we can offer, but I feel better at a university, I feel like I can contribute to a lot of people.”

During this ceremony, Kareen Rispal, also wanted to emphasize the committed and humanistic side of the Montreal researcher in the debate on the ethical and societal impacts of artificial intelligence. In particular, she mentioned Yoshua Bengio’s participation in the development of the Franco-Canadian Declaration on Artificial Intelligence. Adopted in 2018, this declaration promotes ” a human-centered vision of artificial intelligence focused on respect for human rights, inclusion, diversity, innovation and economic growth.” Indeed, she told the researcher:

“All of your scientific and academic qualities alone warrant this recognition. But your great contribution, the one that goes beyond the scope of your scientific work, is your determination to share knowledge in order to promote the enrichment of knowledge and the transfer of technology. Through all of your actions, you have been, and still are, a true catalyst for the technology sector in Montreal.”

The latter concludes:

“It is a great honor to be awarded this insignia by the French Republic, the country where I was born and raised, and to receive it here in Montreal. I thank the national order for having selected me. I am convinced that it is through international cooperation and scientific collaboration and interdisciplinarity that we will succeed in solving the many human, social and environmental challenges of our time. To this end, artificial intelligence is a powerful tool for innovation that must be implemented for the benefit of the people of our respective countries and the world.”

Translated from Québec : Yoshua Bengio décoré de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’honneur