Yoshua Bengio won the 2018 Turing Award for work on neural networks. Credit: The Canadian Press/Alamy
Computer scientist Yoshua Bengio has become the first person to have their work cited more than one million times on the search engine Google Scholar.
Bengio, who is based at the University of Montreal in Canada, is known for his pioneering research on machine learning. He has been called one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence (AI), alongside computer scientists Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto in Canada and Yann LeCun at the technology company Meta in New York City. The trio shared the A. M. Turing Award — the most prestigious prize in computer science — in 2019 for work on neural networks.
The most-cited papers of the twenty-first century
Bengio’s top-cited papers include one he co-authored in 2014 titled Generative Adversarial Nets1, which has more than more than 105,000 Google Scholar citations, as well as a Nature review paper2 he wrote with LeCun and Hinton. The list also includes papers on ‘attention’, a technique that helps machines to analyse text. Attention became one of the crucial innovations that fuelled the chatbot revolution, starting with ChatGPT in 2022.
The “remarkable” achievement highlights the tremendous growth in popularity of machine learning, says Kaiming He, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who is an author on the most-cited paper of the twenty-first century, according to a Nature analysis published earlier this year. Of the top ten most cited papers this century, eight were on machine learning.
“AI is changing the world, and we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg,” Bengio tells Nature.
Outstanding track record