Among the 25 most-cited papers of the 21st century are three authored by University of Toronto computer scientists, according to a recent analysis by the journal Nature.
The papers are closely connected to the department’s history as a birthplace of artificial intelligence technologies, which are now transforming nearly every aspect of society.
From left to right: Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky in 2013. (Photo: Johnny Guatto)
The deep learning revolution got its start at U of T with the “AlexNet” paper in 2012 that demonstrated the versatile utility of multi-layered artificial neural networks. That paper, officially titled “ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks,” was co-authored by Alex Krizhevsky (BSc 2007, MSc 2009), Ilya Sutskever (BSc 2005, MSc 2007, PhD 2013) and University Professor Emeritus of computer science Geoffrey Hinton and ranked eighth on the list.
A 2015 review paper on deep learning, co-authored by Hinton and fellow recipients of the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, is the 16th most-cited paper.
Aidan Gomez in 2017. (Photo: Nina Haikara)
A 2017 paper by researchers at Google, including then-intern and U of T computer science undergraduate Aidan Gomez (BSc 2018), presented the transformer, a neural network architecture that has served as a foundation for advances in large language models that power tools like ChatGPT. “Attention is all you need” is the seventh most-cited paper of the century.
Hinton noted to Nature that AI papers have an advantage when it comes to quantity of citations, given the broad range of fields that are drawing upon AI research, combined with rapid technological progress and a large volume of papers