Samy Bengio

Timeline

1. 1965

   Born in 1965

   He was born in 1965.

2. 1983–1993

   Studying computer science

   He earned a BSc in computer science in 1986, an MSc in 1989 and a PhD in 1993 at Université de Montréal.

3. 1993–1996

   Postdocs in speech and time series

   After a research-assistant role at Université de Montréal, he completed postdoctoral work at France Télécom's CNET and INRS-Télécommunications, studying neural-network time-series prediction and speech recognition.

4. 1996–1999

   Machine learning for finance

   At CIRANO, he developed machine-learning and statistical models for financial markets; he then became research director at Microcell Labs.

5. 1999–2007

   An open machine-learning library

   At IDIAP, he researched machine-learning algorithms, supervised PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, and managed research projects. He co-wrote Torch, an open-source machine-learning library.

6. 2007–2021

   Research inside Google Brain

   At Google Research, he headed part of Google Brain and contributed to projects that improved image search. With Chiyuan Zhang, Moritz Hardt, Benjamin Recht and Oriol Vinyals, he coauthored the ICLR 2017 paper “Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization,” which examined why large neural networks generalize and received a Best Paper Award. He served as NeurIPS program chair in 2017 and general chair in 2018.

7. Since 2021

   Leading AI research at Apple

   He serves as Apple's senior director of AI and machine-learning research.

8. 2023–2024

   Logic and an EPFL role

   In 2023, his coauthored study of Boolean functions and generalization on unseen examples won an ICML Outstanding Paper Award and introduced Degree-Curriculum. In 2024, EPFL appointed him adjunct professor in its School of Computer and Communication Sciences.