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Le Quoc Viet has received the prestigious award Innovators Under 35 for his “deep learning” research, according to the US leading magazine MIT Technology Review. 

The magazine said that this is first time a Vietnamese person has been listed among 35 most outstanding inventors under 35 in 2014.

Growing up in rural Vietnam, Viet did not have electricity at home. He decided around age 14 that humanity would be helped most by a machine smart enough to be an inventor in its own right—an idea that remains only a dream. But it set Viet on a path toward pioneering an approach to artificial intelligence that could let software understand the world more the way humans do.

That technology sprang from the frustration Viet felt at the Australian National University and then as a PhD candidate at Stanford in the US as he learned about the state of machine intelligence.

While at Stanford, Viet worked out a strategy that would let software learn things itself. Academics had begun to report promising but very slow results with a method known as deep learning, which uses networks of simulated neurons.

Viet saw how to speed it up significantly—by building simulated neural networks 100 times larger that could process thousands of times more data. It was an approach practical enough to attract the attention of Google, which hired him to test it under the guidance of the AI researcher Andrew Ng’.

When Ng’s results became public in 2012, they sparked a race at Facebook, Microsoft, and other companies to invest in deep-learning research. Without any human guidance, his system had learned how to detect cats, people, and over 3,000 other objects just by ingesting 10 million images from YouTube videos. It proved that machines could learn without labored assistance from humans, and reach new levels of accuracy to boot.

The technique is now used in Google’s image search and speech-recognition software. The ultra-intelligent machine Viet once imagined remains distant. But seeing his ideas make software smart enough to assist people in their everyday lives feels pretty good.