Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian researcher of AI and professor of computer science at the Universite de Montreal. He is one of the early developers of deep learning, the core technology of AI, and is referred to as one of the four godfathers of AI, along with Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Andrew Ng. After reading a paper from Hinton in 1985, he turned his attention to neural networks research. He received the Turing Award in 2018 together with Hinton and LeCun for their contributions to the development of deep learning.

 He continues to work in the field of AI at MILA, the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, which he founded some 30 years ago. He is at the forefront of advocating for the ethical use of AI, one of the biggest issues surrounding the development and implementation of AI today.

 Andrew Ng, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University, is considered one of the world’s four pioneers of online AI education. He co-founded and led Google Brain, called “one of the most ambitious artificial-intelligence systems to date” by WIRED. As a chief scientist at Baidu, China’s largest search engine, he made the company one of the most competitive in the world in AI fields such as natural language processing and machine learning.

 In 2012, with Daphne Koller of Stanford University, Andrew Ng co-founded Coursera, an online learning platform offering free college-level courses to anyone willing to learn. Coursera is currently the largest MOOC platform globally and offers more than 4,000 courses to over 77 million registered learners (as of 2020). Coursera cooperates with around 150 partner universities around the world, including Johns Hopkins, Yale, and Peking.

 Yuval Harari is a professor of history at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of the global best seller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. His research covers a broad range of topics, from the relationship between history and biology, to the progress and direction of humanity, to the question of happiness throughout history. He gained international prominence through a YouTube video on world history, and over 80,000 people worldwide have enrolled in his MOOC lecture, “A Brief History of Humankind.”

 His book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, was a phenomenon that made Yuval Harari an academic superstar. This interdisciplinary work covering anthropology, sociology, and biology generated a significant amount of interest around the world, especially in Europe, the U.S., and Asia. In his follow-up book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, he examined the possibilities for the future of our species, the Homo sapiens. In his latest book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he uses "Big History" to explain to us his unique perspective on our state of happiness as modern day humans as compared to our ancestors who came before us.

 Nick Bostrom is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford and director of the Future of Humanity Institute, an interdisciplinary research center where experts such as futurists, engineers, and economists investigate big-picture questions about humanity and where it’s heading, especially through the lens of future tech. Professor Bostrom is widely known as an expert in many fields, including neuroscience, mathematical logic, physics, and philosophy. In 2009, he received the Eugene R. Gannon Award, which is given out yearly to someone who dedicates their life to the betterment of humanity through creative or academic means. He was also included in Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list in 2009 and 2014 and ranked 15th on the list of Prospect Magazine’s World’s Top Thinkers in 2014.

 His major works are Anthropic Bias (2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (2008), Human Enhancement (2009), and Superintelligence (2014), which provoked worldwide discussions on artificial intelligence and its ability to transcend human intellect. In 2019, his “Vulnerable World Hypothesis” sparked countless academic discussions on what could cause the end of humanity.