God Fathers of AI

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In other fields of studies or in religion, there is only one god or only one godfather. But in the field of AI, that is not the case. There are many pioneers or Godfathers who have done significant work in this field. Recently, the resignation of Dr. Geoffrey Hinton from Google raised eyebrows in the business world and in Governments the world over. Technology is good or bad, it depends upon whose hand it is. Geoffrey raised that concern and for that, he wants better controls in place. What will happen, we need to follow the progress and raise our voices around. In this article, I am mentioning some godfathers of AI, their workplaces, and their contributions. I am sure this will inspire many young minds.

*Age as of May 2023

1. Arthur Samuel (1901-1990, age 89) Worked at : IBM. His Contribution: Developed the first machine learning program, which played checkers at a high level, and created the term “machine learning”.
2. Alan Turing (1912-1954, age 41) Worked at : University of Manchester, UK. His Contribution : Developed the concept of a universal machine, laid the theoretical groundwork for digital computing, and created the Turing test for determining whether a machine exhibits intelligent behavior. Turing made significant contributions to AI and computer programming during World War II.
3. Claude Shannon (1916-2001, age 84) Worked at : Bell Labs. His Contribution : Shannon was a mathematician and electrical engineer, laid the groundwork for digital circuit design theory and information theory, and made significant contributions to the development of early AI systems.
4. Herbert Simon (1916-2001, age 84) Worked at : Carnegie Mellon. His Contribution : Developed the first AI program to solve algebra problems, and made significant contributions to the fields of decision-making and problem-solving in AI.
5. John McCarthy (1927-2011, age 84) Worked at : Stanford. His Contribution : Coined the term “Artificial Intelligence”, developed the programming language LISP, and was a founding member of the MIT AI laboratory.
6. Marvin Minsky (1927-2016, age 88) Worked at : MIT. His Contribution : Co-founder of the MIT AI laboratory, developed the first neural network simulator, and made significant contributions to the fields of robotics and AI.
7. Allen Newell (1927-1992, age 65) Worked at : Carnegie Mellon. His Contribution : Co-developer of the General Problem Solver (GPS), one of the earliest AI programs, and made significant contributions to the field of AI in general.
8. Judea Pearl (1936- age 87) Worked at : University of. His Contribution : Developed Bayesian networks and causal inference, which have been influential in the development of AI systems that can reason about cause and effect relationships.
9. Geoffrey Hinton (1947- age 76) Worked at : University of Toronto. His Contribution : Pioneered the backpropagation algorithm for training neural networks, made significant contributions to the development of deep learning, and co-founded the Vector Institute for AI. Geoffrey Hinton joined Google in March 2013 when Google acquired his company DNNresearch Inc. He then became a distinguished researcher at Google and continued to work there until September 2021, when he announced that he was leaving Google to focus on his own research and startup.
10. Rodney Brooks (1954- age 69) Worked at : MIT. His Contribution : Co-founder of iRobot and former director of the MIT AI laboratory, made significant contributions to the fields of robotics and AI, particularly in the area of autonomy.
11. Yann LeCun (1960- age 63) Worked at : Facebook AI Research. His Contribution : Developed the convolutional neural network (CNN), which is widely used in computer vision systems, and made significant contributions to deep learning and AI.
12. Kai-Fu Lee (1961- age 62) Worked at : Sinovation Ventures. His Contribution : Founded several AI companies, including Google China and Sinovation Ventures, and has been a key player in the development of the AI industry in China.
13. Stuart Russell (1962- age 61) Worked at : University of California, Berkeley.. His Contribution : Co-author of the leading textbook on AI, “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,” and has made significant contributions to the development of AI, particularly in the area of probabilistic reasoning and decision-making under uncertainty.
14. Cynthia Breazeal (1967- age 56) Worked at : MIT. His Contribution : Developed the first social robot, Kismet, and has made significant contributions to the development of socially intelligent robots.
15. Yoshua Bengio (1964- age 59) Worked at : University of Montreal, Canada. His Contribution : Made significant contributions to the development of deep learning, particularly in the area of natural language processing, and co-founded the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms.
16. Demis Hassabis (1976- age 46) Worked at : DeepMind. His Contribution : Co-founder of DeepMind, which developed the first AI system to beat a human champion at the game of Go, and has made significant breakthroughs in deep learning and reinforcement learning.
17. Fei-Fei Li (1976- age 46) Worked at : Stanford. Her Contribution : Made significant contributions to computer vision and image recognition, and co-created the ImageNet dataset, which has been instrumental in the development of deep learning systems.
18. Andrew Ng (1976- age 46) Worked at : Stanford. His Contribution : Co-founder of Google Brain, founder of Coursera, and made significant contributions to the development of deep learning and machine learning education.
19. Ilya Sutskever (1984- age 39) Worked at : OpenAI. His Contribution : Co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, made significant contributions to the development of deep learning, particularly in the area of generative models.

Apart from these there are some other great researchers whom we saw in last 10 years.

1. Ian Goodfellow (1985) - A researcher in machine learning and artificial intelligence who is known for his work on generative adversarial networks (GANs).
2. Jeff Dean (1968) - A computer scientist and Senior Fellow at Google who is known for his work on large-scale distributed systems, machine learning, and computer vision.
3. Pieter Abbeel (1977, Belgium. Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab) - A computer science professor at UC Berkeley who is known for his work in deep reinforcement learning, robotics, and machine learning.
4. Regina Barzilay (1970, Israeli-American computer scientis) - A computer science professor at MIT who is known for her work in natural language processing and machine learning, particularly in the area of cancer research.
5. Timnit Gebru (1983, Ethiopian) - A computer scientist and former co-lead of the Ethical AI team at Google who is known for her work in bias in machine learning, and for her advocacy of diversity and inclusion in the field of AI.
6. Alex Krizhevsky ( Ukrainian-born Canadian)- A computer scientist and AI researcher who is known for his work in deep learning and convolutional neural networks. AlexNet
7. Pieter Abbeel (1977, AI Research Lab at the University of California, Berkeley) - A computer science professor at UC Berkeley who is known for his work in deep reinforcement learning, robotics, and machine learning.
8. Ashish Vaswani (Google Brain)- A computer scientist and AI researcher who has made significant contributions to the field in the last decade. He is known for his work in natural language processing and machine learning, particularly in the area of attention mechanisms. Vaswani is one of the co-authors of the “Attention is All You Need” paper, which introduced the Transformer architecture for neural machine translation and has since become widely used in natural language processing tasks. He has also previously worked at Microsoft Research and IBM Research.