Yoshua Bengio

Biosketch

Yoshua Bengio is Full Professor of Computer Science at Université de Montreal, Co-President and Scientific Director of LawZero, as well as the Founder and Scientific Advisor of Mila and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. Considered one of the world’s leaders in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, he is the recipient of the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, considered to be the “Nobel Prize of computing.” He is also the most cited computer scientist worldwide. Professor Bengio is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of London and Canada, an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Knight of the Legion of Honor of France, a member of the UN’s Scientific Advisory Board for Independent Advice on Breakthroughs in Science and Technology, and chairs the International AI Safety Report.

Research Interests

Dr. Bengio’s research in machine learning and artificial intelligence focuses on uncovering the principles of intelligence through the development of novel learning algorithms and deep neural architectures. His work investigates representation learning, generative modeling, and probabilistic reasoning as key avenues for enabling machines to acquire and generalize knowledge from limited data. In early 2023, Dr. Bengio shifted focus from enhancing AI capabilities to prioritizing AI safety, with particular emphasis on safe AI by design to avoid the emergence of self-preserving and deceptive behaviors. This has led to the development of non-agentic AI frameworks such as “Scientist AI,” which emphasize understanding, explanation, and prediction rather than autonomous action. These systems are conceived as safety layers that probabilistically evaluate the reliability of other AI models and block potentially harmful outcomes. His group is studying methods to embed calibrated uncertainty, humility, causal reasoning, and interpretability into deep learning architectures, with the aim of building models that are robust, transparent, and aligned with human values. These directions seek to ensure that artificial intelligence develops in directions that are beneficial, trustworthy, and safe for humanity.