Samy Bengio

Samy Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, Senior Director of AI and Machine Learning Research at Apple,^[1] and a former long-time scientist at Google^[2] known for leading a large group of researchers working in machine learning including adversarial settings. Bengio left Google shortly after the company fired his report, Timnit Gebru, without first notifying him.^[3][4] At the time, Bengio said that he had been "stunned" by what happened to Gebru.^[5] He is also among the three authors who developed Torch in 2002,^[6] the ancestor of PyTorch,^[7] one of today's two largest machine learning frameworks.^[8]

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, Samy Bengio has authored around 250 scientific papers on neural networks, machine learning, deep learning, statistics, computer vision and natural language processing.^[9] The most cited^[10] 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,^[11] one of the first deep learning approaches to image captioning,^[12] efforts to understand why deep learning works^[13] leading to many follow-up works.^[14] He also worked on the first evidence that adversarial examples can exist in the real world, i.e. one can really change a physical object such that a machine learning system would be fooled^[15] and one of the first works on zero-shot recognition, i.e., recognizing classes never seen during training.^[16]

Bengio worked at the IDIAP Research Institute and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, from 1999 to 2007.^[17]

He was General Chair of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in 2018^[18] served as program chair of NeurIPS in 2017^[19] and is currently a board member.^[20] He was also program chair of ICLR (2015-2016)^[21] and sits on its board (2018-2020).^[22]

Bengio is also an editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research.^[23]

Samy Bengio was born to two Moroccan Jews who emigrated to France and Canada. He is the brother of Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio.^[24] Both of them lived in Morocco for a year during their father's military service there.^[24] His father, Carlo Bengio, was a pharmacist who wrote theatre pieces and ran a Sephardic theatrical troupe in Montreal that played Judeo-Arabic pieces.^[25][26] 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.^[27]