[diego_moita]

Funny plot twist: the pioneer on leveraging computation on neural networks is actually a British: Geoffrey Hinton, living in Canada.

Btw, Rich Sutton was born in the U.S. but renounced his American citizenship, becoming Canadian.

[NalNezumi]

And a MORE funny story is,(according to an coworker of mine, whose PhD supervisor was a friend to Hinton) that when Hinton was looking for university to conduct his work in, he was rejected by the UK universities which was his first choices. So ended up in Canada.

So the plot twist comes with a bit of irony!

[mafribe]

Yes, Hinton was on a temporary position at the University of Sussex (IIRC, the Centre for Cognitive Science) for a while, but was not offered a permanent academic position there when he applied.

[fulafel]

Also, the history of the the underlying advances is a lot more international than current popular telling of the history lets on. See eg https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/scientific-integrity-turing...