Computer Vision News - November 2018

Well, Yoshua was born in France too! But I’m not a great theoretician. Contrary to my friend Léon Bottou, who is fantastic at maths and things like that. I’m okay at implementing things and making them work, but I’m not spectacular. People have different skills. Well, you’re French and I’m Italian. Some say that we are not too ordered! [ both laugh ] I don’t know, the French tend to be very Cartesian, but I’m not Cartesian at all. I’m more intuitive. Have there been mentors or teachers who have influenced you? Or were you mostly self-taught? There have been a bunch of people who have had a big influence on me. The maths professors at my engineering school were very supportive. I did a number of projects with them on topics that they were not experts in, but they let me explore for myself, so that gave me the taste for research really. They were very nice. That was when I started working on neural nets. I didn’t know how to do research. I had to figure out for myself how it was done. I learnt English by reading papers written by Japanese people, so my English at the time was horrible! [ he laughs ] Most of the research on neural nets in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s was from Japan, because people in the West had completely abandoned the field. That’s the papers that we were reading from. Then there are, of course, figures of science that I was interested by. Certainly, early on I read a lot about Einstein. I was very much into physics 6 Computer Vision News With Yoshua Bengio (left), Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Joëlle Pineau (center) “I learnt English by reading papers written by Japanese people, so my English at the time was horrible!” Yann LeCun Guest