Samy Bengio

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, Bengio has authored around 250 scientific papers on neural networks, machine learning, deep learning, statistics, computer vision and natural language processing.^[2] The most cited^[3] 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,^[4] one of the first deep learning approaches to image captioning,^[5] efforts to understand why deep learning works^[6] leading to many follow-up works.^[7] He also worked on the first evidence that adversarial examples can exist in the real world, i.e., one can change a physical object such that a machine learning system would be fooled^[8] and one of the first works on zero-shot recognition, i.e., recognizing classes never seen during training.^[9]

Bengio is senior director of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Research at Apple and an adjunct professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.^[10] He was a longtime scientist at Google,^[11] where he led a large group of researchers working in machine learning, including adversarial settings. Bengio left Google shortly after the company fired Timnit Gebru without first notifying him.^[12][13] At the time, Bengio said that he had been "stunned" by what happened to Gebru.^[14]

Bengio worked at the IDIAP Research Institute and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, from 1999 to 2007.^[15] He was appointed adjunct professor in Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL in 2024.^[10]

He was general chair of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in 2018,^[16] served as program chair of the conference in 2017,^[17] and is currently a board member.^[18] He was also program chair of ICLR (2015–2016)^[19] and sits on its board (2018–2020).^[20]

He is a co-author of Torch,^[21] the ancestor of PyTorch,^[22] one of today's two largest machine learning frameworks.^[23]

Bengio is an editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research.^[24]

Samy Bengio was born to two Moroccan Jews who emigrated to France and Canada. His brother Yoshua is a Turing Award winner.^[25] Both of them lived in Morocco for a year during their father's military service there.^[25] His father, Carlo Bengio, was a pharmacist who wrote theatre pieces and ran a Sephardic theatrical troupe in Montreal that played Judeo-Arabic pieces.^[26][27] 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.^[28]