{"id":4156,"date":"2019-04-05T10:45:16","date_gmt":"2019-04-05T15:45:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=4156"},"modified":"2019-09-24T21:20:35","modified_gmt":"2019-09-25T02:20:35","slug":"congratulations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=4156","title":{"rendered":"Congratulations!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Congrats to <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Geoffrey_Hinton\">Geoffrey Hinton<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Yann_LeCun\">Yann LeCun<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Yoshua_Bengio\">Yoshua Bengio<\/a>, who <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/03\/27\/technology\/turing-award-ai.html\">won<\/a> the 2018 <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Turing_Award\">Turing Award<\/a> for their work on deep learning (i.e., what used to be called neural nets).  This might be the first Turing Award ever given for something where no one really understands why it works &#8230; and it&#8217;s years overdue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Congrats to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.ias.edu\/avi\/home\">Avi Wigderson<\/a> for <a href=\"https:\/\/rjlipton.wordpress.com\/2019\/04\/05\/avi-wins-the-knuth-prize\/\">winning<\/a> the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Knuth_Prize\">Knuth Prize<\/a>.  When I was asked to write a supporting nomination letter, my first suggestion was to submit a blank sheet of paper&#8212;since for anyone in theoretical computer science, there&#8217;s nothing that needs to be said about why Avi should win any awards we have.  I hope Avi remains a guiding light of our community for many years to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And congrats to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.princeton.edu\/~mbraverm\/pmwiki\/index.php?n=Site.Main?setview=display\">Mark Braverman<\/a> for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nsf.gov\/news\/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=298217&amp;WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&amp;WT.mc_ev=click\">winning<\/a> the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Alan_T._Waterman_Award\">Alan T. Waterman Award<\/a>, one that I have some personal fondness for, along with materials scientist Jennifer Dionne.  As Sasha Razborov once put it, after he (Sasha), I, and others recoiled from the task of proving the <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.computationalcomplexity.org\/2009\/01\/fooling-constant-depth-circuits.html\">Linial-Nisan Conjecture<\/a>, that polylog-wise independent distributions are indistinguishable from uniform by AC<sup>0<\/sup> circuits, a &#8220;braver man&#8221; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.toronto.edu\/~mbraverm\/FoolAC0v7.pdf\">stepped in<\/a> to do the job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Congrats to Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio, who won the 2018 Turing Award for their work on deep learning (i.e., what used to be called neural nets). This might be the first Turing Award ever given for something where no one really understands why it works &#8230; and it&#8217;s years overdue. Congrats to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[31,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements","category-complexity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4156"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4159,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4156\/revisions\/4159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}