Yoshua Bengio

Yoshua Bengio OC OQ OBE FRS FRSC (born March 5, 1964[3]) is a Canadian computer scientist, and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning.[4][5][6] Bengio received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing", with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for their foundational work on deep learning.[7] Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI".[8][9][10][11][12][13] Bengio is the most-cited computer scientist globally (by both total citations and by h-index),[14] and the most-cited living scientist across all fields (by total citations).[15] In November 2025, Bengio became the first AI researcher with more than a million Google Scholar citations. In 2024, Time magazine included Bengio in its yearly list of the world's 100 most influential people.[16] Bengio is a professor at the Université de Montréal and co-president and scientific director of the nonprofit LawZero. He founded Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence (AI) Institute, and was its scientific director until 2025. Bengio was born in France to a Jewish family who had emigrated to France from Morocco. The family then relocated to Canada.[17] He received his Bachelor of Engineering degree (Computer engineering), MSc (computer science) and PhD (computer science) from McGill University.[2][18]