5 VinFuture Prize winners honored at Queen Elizabeth Prize 2025

The winners of the VinFuture 2024 main prize have just been honored at the prestigious Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering 2025 for their inventions that create modern machine learning technology.

Professor Yoshua Bengio, Professor Yann LeCun and Dr. Bill Dally (from left) are three of the seven scientists honored at the Queen Elizabeth Prize 2025. Previously, Professor Bengio and Professor LeCun, along with Professor Geoffrey Hinton, Mr. Jensen Huang and Professor Fei-Fei Li were awarded the main VinFuture Prize 2024 - Photo: Guardian

Previously, many VinFuture Prize winners have been consecutively honored with the Nobel Prize, which is a testament to the VinFuture Prize's ability to early identify globally influential works.

According to the announcement of the Queen Elizabeth Prize, scientists including Professor Yoshua Bengio, Professor Geoffrey Hinton, Professor John Hopfield, Professor Yann LeCun, Mr. Jensen Huang, Dr. Bill Dally and Professor Fei-Fei Li were honored for their important contributions to the development of modern machine learning - a key factor leading to the breakthrough progress of artificial intelligence (AI). The award for the group of scientists is 500,000 pounds.

Explaining the selection of this year's honorees, the Queen Elizabeth Prize Foundation said it wanted to recognize all three core pillars of modern machine learning: algorithms, high-performance hardware, and quality datasets.

This comprehensive recognition also coincides with the decision of the VinFuture Prize Council to award the main prize worth 3 million USD to a group of 5 leading scientists in the field of AI in December 2024.

At that time, Professors Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio were honored for their revolutionary contributions to neural networks and deep learning algorithms.

In addition, computing performance has also increased rapidly thanks to advances in the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) led by Jensen Huang. The creation of the ImageNet dataset by Professor Fei-Fei Li has spurred advances in image recognition systems, helping to train deep learning models at scale.

Not only honoring outstanding scientists, the difference of the VinFuture Prize compared to most international prizes lies in discovering and honoring pioneers who bring science into life to serve humanity.

VinFuture is the first major international science award to honor Mr. Jensen Huang - a non-academic figure and Professor Fei-Fei Li, demonstrating the comprehensive vision of the VinFuture Prize Council and in line with the development trend of modern science and technology, when achievements with great impact are the result of the combination of academic research and practical application.

Professor Richard Henry Friend - Chairman of the VinFuture Prize Council - said this is exactly what VinFuture is aiming for - a comprehensive recognition of contributions from all components of the science and technology ecosystem.

Breakthrough innovations often come from the intersection of academic research and industrial development. Only when scientists and businesses work together can truly meaningful breakthroughs be created for humanity.

The Queen Elizabeth Prize shares the vision of the VinFuture Prize by comprehensively honoring the three core pillars of modern machine learning, while honoring representatives from industry alongside outstanding scientists - Photo: VinFuture

The vision and mission of the VinFuture Prize are increasingly solidified in the world science and technology community, as many VinFuture Prize winners continue to be honored with long-standing international awards, especially the Nobel Prize.

In 2023, Dr. Katalin Karikó and Professor Drew Weissman, the two main winners of the VinFuture 2021 prize, were honored with the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their research on nucleoside modifications, an important premise for the development of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

By 2024, Dr. Demis Hassabis (UK) and Dr. John Jumper (USA) - co-winners of the VinFuture special prize for scientists researching new fields 2022 - will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating an AI model to predict protein structure.

In the same year, Professor Geoffrey Hinton was honored with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for his fundamental discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning using artificial neural networks.

According to Professor Friend, these honors are the clearest evidence of the VinFuture Prize's ability to quickly identify globally influential works, even though the prize has only been in operation for more than 4 years.

The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering was launched in 2012 to honour groundbreaking engineering innovations that benefit humanity globally.

So far, 26 scientists have been honoured with the prize. The 2025 winners will share the £500,000 prize money.

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/5-vinfuture-award-recipients-duoc-vinh-danh-tai-giai-thuong-nu-hoang-elizabeth-2025-20250206103028934.htm