Pierre Baldi Receives 2023 INNS Dennis Gabor Award

The International Neural Network Society (INNS) selected Pierre Baldi as the distinguished recipient of the 2023 INNS Dennis Gabor Award for “remarkable contributions to the engineering of neural networks, applications of machine learning and related sciences.” Named for the esteemed electrical engineer and physicist who invented holography, the award is one of three INNS Lifetime Contribution Awards that recognize outstanding individuals whose scientific life contributions to the field of neural networks have proven to be paradigm-changing and long-lasting.

“I have been continuously working on neural networks, deep learning, and AI since I was a graduate student,” says Baldi, now a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). “Together with my students and other collaborators, we have helped develop the theory of neural networks as well as their numerous applications in engineering and science, particularly in physics, chemistry, and biomedicine.”

Last year, Baldi co-authored a paper in the journal Artificial Intelligence, “The Quarks of Attention: Structure and Capacity of Neural Attention Building Blocks.” The work was one of the first theoretical papers on the topic of attention, which is playing a critical role in today’s application of AI.

While Baldi stresses that “scientific discovery is its own reward,” he acknowledges that he appreciates the recognition. “I’m happy and grateful to see our work being recognized. What is fundamental about neural networks is how they store information by shattering it across large numbers of synapses, a process that is reminiscent of Gabor’s holography.” He was honored to attend the Awards Presentation held at the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2024) in Yokohama Japan on July 3.

— Shani Murray