The Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest organization representing the computing industry, is described as “the Nobel Prize of computing.” Yann LeCun and two Canadians—Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton—were recognized for setting the foundation for AI research. (New York Times)

Talking point: The three scientists are being recognized for their contributions 15 years after Hinton began working on neural networks at the University of Toronto. While Canada puffs up its AI talent and the government invests millions into the sector, it wasn’t always that way. Early Canadian researchers in the 1990s were considered “outcasts” for their AI work because the computer science community didn’t think it would go anywhere, according to Tomi Poutanen, co-founder of the Vector Institute and one such researcher. Hinton went on to Google in 2013, where, from its Toronto and Mountain View offices, he helped the company improve its image recognition capabilities, while Bengio remained in academia at the University of Montreal.