Alex Krizhevsky

Alex Krizhevsky

A Ukrainian-Canadian researcher whose network, AlexNet, won the 2012 ImageNet competition by a margin so wide that it ended the debate about deep learning's practical value in a single result. Built with Ilya Sutskever under Geoffrey Hinton's supervision, it combined convolutional layers, ReLU activations and dropout, and was trained on two consumer NVIDIA GPUs in his bedroom, establishing the pattern of scaling up an old architecture on new hardware and a large dataset. He also compiled the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets. (See also: Ilya Sutskever, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Deep learning, Compute)