Samy Bengio | |
---|---|
Born | 1965 (age 58–59) |
Nationality | Canadian |
Alma mater | Université de Montréal |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Computer science |
Institutions | Google, IDIAP Research Institute, Microcell Labs |
Thesis | Optimisation d'une règle d'apprentissage pour réseaux de neurones artificiels (Optimization of a learning rule for artificial neural networks) (1993) |
Website | bengio |
Samy Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, Senior Director of AI and Machine Learning Research at Apple,[1] and a former long-time scientist at Google[2] known for leading a large group of researchers working in machine learning including adversarial settings. Bengio left Google shortly after the company fired his report, Timnit Gebru, without first notifying him.[3][4] At the time, Bengio said that he had been "stunned" by what happened to Gebru.[5] He is also among the three authors who developed Torch in 2002,[6] the ancestor of PyTorch,[7] one of today's two largest machine learning frameworks.[8]
Bengio obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1993 with a thesis titled Optimization of a Parametric Learning Rule for Neural Networks from the Université de Montréal. Before that, Bengio got an M.Sc. in Computer Science in 1989 with a thesis on Integration of Traditional and Intelligence Tutoring Systems from the same university, together with a B.Sc. in Computer Science in 1986.
According to DBLP, Samy Bengio has authored around 250 scientific papers on neural networks, machine learning, deep learning, statistics, computer vision and natural language processing.[9] The most cited[10] of these include some of the early works sparking the 2010s deep learning revolution by showing how to explore the many learned representations obtained through deep learning,[11] one of the first deep learning approaches to image captioning,[12] efforts to understand why deep learning works[13] leading to many follow-up works.[14] He also worked on the first evidence that adversarial examples can exist in the real world, i.e. one can really change a physical object such that a machine learning system would be fooled[15] and one of the first works on zero-shot recognition, i.e., recognizing classes never seen during training.[16]
Bengio worked at the IDIAP Research Institute and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, from 1999 to 2007.[17]
He was General Chair of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in 2018[18] served as program chair of NeurIPS in 2017[19] and is currently a board member.[20] He was also program chair of ICLR (2015-2016)[21] and sits on its board (2018-2020).[22]
Bengio is also an editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research.[23]
Samy Bengio was born to two Moroccan Jews who emigrated to France and Canada. He is the brother of Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio.[24] Both of them lived in Morocco for a year during their father's military service there.[24] His father, Carlo Bengio, was a pharmacist who wrote theatre pieces and ran a Sephardic theatrical troupe in Montreal that played Judeo-Arabic pieces.[25][26] His mother, Célia Moreno, is also an artist who played in one of the major theatre scenes of Morocco that was run by Tayeb Seddiki in the 1970s.[27]