Hinton, LeCun, Bengio and Hassabis win the 2022 Princess of Asturias Award

Background

The 2022 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research was decided at a jury meeting in Oviedo. The jury focused on artificial intelligence, and in particular on deep learning. Deep learning is an AI technique based on neural networks: systems made of many connected computational units that adjust their internal settings as they are exposed to examples, so that they can recognise patterns in new data. ^[2] The jury stated that contributions to deep learning had led to major advances in speech recognition, natural language processing, object perception, machine translation, strategy optimization, the analysis of protein structure, and medical diagnosis. ^[1] The range is important: these are different kinds of tasks, from understanding language to analysing biological molecules and supporting medical decisions.

The decision

At its meeting in Oviedo on 15 June 2022, the jury for the 2022 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research unanimously decided to grant the award jointly to the scientists Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio and Demis Hassabis. ^[1] The jury granted the award “for their contributions to the advancement of Artificial Intelligence and its full integration in society.” ^[1] The citation thus joined technical progress with the place of AI in society: the award was not only for a particular algorithm or product, but for work that the jury saw as helping AI become part of everyday systems and institutions.

The winners

The foundation's profile describes Hinton, LeCun and Bengio as considered the “godfathers” of deep learning, an essential AI technique based on the use of neural networks. ^[2] The same profile describes Demis Hassabis as CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, one of the largest artificial intelligence research companies in the world, founded in 2011 and acquired in 2014 by Google. ^[2] The four were therefore honoured together, but the public descriptions point to different roles: Hinton, LeCun and Bengio are associated with the long development of deep learning methods, while Hassabis is associated with leading a large AI research organisation. The jury's decision placed these strands in one award.

Prize and ceremony

Each winner receives 50,000 euros (52,100 US dollars) and a sculpture created by Spanish artist Juan Miro. ^[3] The award is presented at a ceremony held annually in Oviedo in October. ^[3] These details make the award both a recognition and a public event: the jury gives its reasons, and the ceremony in Oviedo gives the prize a public setting.

Why it mattered

The award's importance lies in the scope of the jury's rationale. The jury did not describe deep learning as a single narrow technique; it linked it to speech recognition, natural language processing, object perception, machine translation, strategy optimization, protein-structure analysis and medical diagnosis. ^[1] It also framed the contribution as the advancement of AI and its full integration in society. ^[1] For readers, the award is a marker of how AI research moved from specialised laboratories into many technical fields: the same broad set of methods can be applied wherever large amounts of data contain patterns to be learned. The joint award also connected the people who built deep learning's foundations with the leadership of a major AI company. ^[2]