Four Mila core members recognized as AI 2000 most influential scholars in Canada and worldwide

Three Mila university professors, Joëlle Pineau (McGill), Jian Tang (HEC Montréal), and Aaron Courville (UdeM), as well as Yoshua Bengio (UdeM), Mila’s Founder and Scientific Director, were named among “AI 2000 Most Influential Scholars” by the AMiner web service.

The AI 2000 Most Influential Scholars list was released by the AMiner team of Tsinghua University, Beijing, China on May 18, 2021. It ranks the most influential and active top-cited scholars over the past ten years, covering 20 sub-fields of artificial intelligence.

Clockwise, from left to right: Aaron Courville, Jian Tang, Joëlle Pineau and Yoshua Bengio.

Yoshua Bengio, Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO) at Université de Montréal, is the only Canadian AI researcher to be considered the most influential scholar in five AI research fields:

• Machine Learning – 2rd in Canada and 6th in the world
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) – 1st in Canada and 9th in the world
• AAAI/IJCAI – 1st in Canada and 15th in the world
• Computer Vision – 1st in Canada and 31st in the world
• Speech Recognition – 3rd in Canada and 32nd in the world

Along with Professor Bengio, Professors Tang and Courville join five other distinguished Canadian AI researchers who are listed twice or more in different sections of the list.

Jian Tang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at HEC Montréal:

• Information retrieval and recommendation – 1st in Canada and 5th in the world
• Data mining – 1st in Canada and 42nd in the world

Aaron Courville, Assistant Professor, DIRO, Université de Montréal:

• AAAI/IJCAI – 4th in Canada and 52nd in the world
• Machine learning – 5th in Canada and 43rd in the world

Added to the prestigious list is McGill University Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar Joëlle Pineau, who is the Co-Managing Director at Facebook AI Research in Montreal:

• AAAI/IJCAI – 3rd in Canada and 31st in the world

For more information about the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholars List, click here.