Let’s discuss the Princess of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research 2022.

We discuss with Fernando Ordoñez Ugarte, Chief Business Development Officer at Serviguide TECH.

This week, technology enthusiasts have seen Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Demis Hassabis, fathers of one of the essential techniques of Artificial Intelligence, receive the Princess of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research 2022 for their contributions to the development of deep learning.

Undoubtedly, at Serviguide TECH, we share the words declared by the members of the Committee when announcing the award, as it represents “an extraordinary contribution, with a great current and future impact on the progress of modern society.” It is great news for the technology sector and for Artificial Intelligence in particular, which is granting us significant advances in different areas.

These four professionals have managed to push forward the training of a computer to learn on its own, thanks to continuous patterns and by using many layers of processing, allowing it to perform certain tasks like humans. These tasks include speech recognition, automatic translation, image identification, making predictions, medical diagnostics, etc.

Demis Hassabis is CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, a company that, in 2021, managed to predict with high accuracy the structure of more than 350,000 human proteins. Furthermore, the data were made available to all laboratories worldwide in the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, and the achievement was considered by leading experts as “a real revolution for life sciences, as genomics was decades ago.”

Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio, for their part, were already recognized in 2018 with the Turing Award by the Association for Computing Machinery.

Technology professionals have been observing for some time the great potential of this system and what it is already contributing to sectors such as health, marketing, energy, and food, among many others.

We remain attentive to see what the future of artificial intelligence will hold. For now, we congratulate the awardees for this well-deserved prize.