Hinton, LeCun and Bengio receive the Turing Award for deep learning
The ACM awarded the 2018 A.M. Turing Award to Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio, the 'godfathers of deep learning', for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.
Key facts
- Announced 27 March 2019 (the 2018 award)
- Prize: $1 million, funded by Google
- Recognized work on backpropagation, CNNs, and neural language models
What happened
Computing's highest honor went to the three researchers who kept neural networks alive through the 'AI winters'.
Why it matters
Signaled the complete mainstream acceptance of deep learning within computer science.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
- Rumelhart, Hinton & Williams popularize backpropagation ★★★★★
- Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton ★★★★★
- Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google so he can speak freely about AI risks ★★★★
Sources (2)
id: 2019-03-27-turing-award-deep-learning · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline