2018 Turing Award ceremony in San Francisco

Background

The 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award was awarded to Bengio, Hinton and LeCun. ACM announced the award in New York on 27 March 2019. In its announcement, ACM said the three had worked independently and together to develop conceptual foundations, identify surprising experimental phenomena and contribute engineering advances ^[1]. ACM also said their early efforts to rekindle interest in neural networks were initially met with skepticism ^[1]. That detail places the award in a longer research history: the work being honored had not always been widely accepted.

Ceremony

ACM said the three would formally receive the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award at ACM's annual awards banquet on Saturday 15 June 2019 in San Francisco, California ^[1]. The announcement and the ceremony were separate moments: the award was made public in March 2019, and the formal presentation was set for June 2019 ^[1]. ACM said the prize carries $1 million, with financial support from Google, Inc. ^[1]. The ceremony therefore marked the formal conferral of an award whose public explanation had already been issued.

What the award recognized

ACM described the contribution in three overlapping parts: conceptual foundations, surprising experimental phenomena and engineering advances ^[1]. These are different kinds of work. Conceptual foundations concern how neural networks and their learning processes are understood and organized. Experimental phenomena concern results observed in practice that may not be fully explained by prior expectations. Engineering advances concern making methods work in real systems. ACM did not reduce the contribution to a single paper or a single moment; it described a body of work produced independently and together ^[1].

In machine learning, a neural network is a layered model trained on examples rather than programmed with explicit rules for every case. Deep learning refers to neural networks with multiple layers that learn representations from data. This general description helps explain why the citation names both conceptual and engineering work: ideas must be made precise, and methods must be made to run at scale.

ACM also said deep learning methods had produced breakthroughs in computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing and robotics ^[1]. These areas involve different kinds of data and tasks. Computer vision deals with images, speech recognition with audio signals, natural language processing with text, and robotics with sensing and control. The citation thus connects foundational research to applications across several areas of computing. It does not claim that one method solved every problem; it records that deep learning produced breakthroughs in those named areas ^[1].

Why it mattered

The award recognized a research direction that had once been viewed with skepticism. ACM said the laureates' early efforts to rekindle interest in neural networks were initially met with skepticism ^[1]. By the time of the award, ACM was describing deep learning as having produced breakthroughs in several fields ^[1]. The 15 June 2019 banquet in San Francisco was the ceremonial moment of recognition, while the 27 March 2019 announcement in New York provided ACM's public account of the work ^[1]. The $1 million prize, supported by Google, Inc., was part of the award arrangement ^[1]. For a general reader, the event can be understood as the formal record of a long research program moving from a contested idea to broad use in computing.