Understanding intelligence and its implications at all levels to unlock artificial intelligence (AI) is Yoshua Bengio’s long-term goal. Scientific Director at IVADO, a full professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at Université de Montréal, the director of the Montréal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) and Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning Algorithms, Professor Bengio aims to reveal the mathematical and computational mechanisms from which intelligence emerges.

Through their work on learning algorithms, Yoshua Bengio and his team are attempting to provide computers with the capacity to acquire operational knowledge by learning from examples. A machine that has acquired knowledge could then accurately generate predictions, categorize new cases and generalize findings to new situations. Professor Bengio seeks to give impetus to the development of more intelligent machines that understand the world around us, make decisions accordingly and are ultimately of service to society.

Research in the field drives a number of scientific and technological sectors, most notably research engines, natural language processing, automatic translation, artificial vision and datamining.

Professor Bengio earned a PhD in computer science from McGill University (1991) and is the co-director of the Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He also holds the NSERC/Ubisoft Industrial Research Chair on Learning Representations for Immersive Video Games and works as the editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research and the associate editor of Neural Computation and Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning.