A 2004 CIFAR program funded the three researchers who would share the 2018 Turing Award

In 2004, when neural networks were deeply unfashionable and most of machine learning had moved to other methods, Canada’s CIFAR launched the Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception program with Geoffrey Hinton as director. Rather than funding grants for specific deliverables, it funded a small hand-picked network of researchers to think and collaborate over the long term. The program brought together the groups of Hinton at Toronto, Yoshua Bengio at Montreal, and Yann LeCun at New York University - the three who would jointly receive the 2018 Turing Award for deep learning - and kept the community coherent through the years when few others were paying attention.