A trio of AI researchers, namely Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, has won this year’s Turing Award for their work on neural networks.

Introduced way back in 1966, the $1 million Turing Award aka the Nobel Prize of Computing will be shared by these three pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

Bengio is Professor at the University of Montreal and Scientific Director at Mila, Quebec’s Artificial Intelligence Institute; Hinton is VP and Engineering Fellow of Google, Chief Scientific Adviser of The Vector Institute, and University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto; and LeCun is Professor at New York University and VP and Chief AI Scientist at Facebook.

The trio were recognized for their breakthrough techniques developed in the 1990s and 2000s in tasks like computer vision and speech recognition. Their work largely contributed to the current proliferation of AI technologies.

Working independently and together, Hinton, LeCun and Bengio developed conceptual foundations for the field, identified surprising phenomena through experiments, and contributed engineering advances that demonstrated the practical advantages of deep neural networks.