U of T computer scientists recognized for outstanding AI research at NeurIPS 2022

Professor David Fleet and University Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton (photos by Ken Jones and Johnny Guatto)

Members of the U of T Department of Computer Science community have been recognized for their outstanding artificial intelligence research at the 2022 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).

The Test of Time Award, recognizing a NeurIPS paper from ten years ago that has had significant impact, was presented to alumni Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever along with University Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton for “ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks.”

“In 2012, it was presented as the first [convolutional neural network] trained on the ImageNet Challenge, far surpassing the state-of-the-art at the time, and since then it has made a huge impact on the machine learning community,” wrote the NeurIPS 2022 program chairs.

An Outstanding Paper Award recognized “Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding,” co-authored by Professor David Fleet. The paper presents Imagen, a text-to-image diffusion model with an “unprecedented” degree of photorealism and a deep level of language understanding.