The acknowledgements, dated 2015, state that the authors Y.L. and Y.B. are fellows of the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research (CIFAR).

TRUE: the acknowledgements of the 2015 paper by LeCun, Bengio and Hinton ('Deep learning', Nature, 27 May 2015) contain the statement that Y.L. and Y.B. are CIFAR fellows, and CIFAR records confirm that LeCun and Bengio held CIFAR fellow or program roles in 2015. MOSTLY TRUE: the statement appears, but CIFAR records give their title slightly differently, for example as program co-director or associate rather than fellow. MOSTLY FALSE: the statement appears in the paper, but CIFAR records show one of the two held no CIFAR affiliation at that time. FALSE: the acknowledgements contain no such statement, or CIFAR records show that neither was affiliated with CIFAR.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Yoshua Bengio - A.M. Turing Award Laureate ACM A.M. Turing Award

   “So was LeCun, with whom Bengio has been codirecting the program (now renamed Learning in Machines and Brains) since 2014.”

2. E2 2010s - CIFAR CIFAR · 13 June 2022

   “Google uses convolutional neural networks, an avenue of deep learning developed by Yann LeCun, program co-director of CIFAR’s Learning in Machines & Brains program”

3. E3 2010s - CIFAR CIFAR · 13 June 2022

   “Bengio, Hinton and LeCun came together at CIFAR in 2004 when Hinton founded what is now the Learning in Machines & Brains program.”

The claim quotes the acknowledgement statement itself. The independent evidence confirms that both men held CIFAR roles in 2015, recorded in that evidence as program co-directors rather than as fellows (E2, E3). ACM's Turing Award profile of Bengio says he and LeCun had co-directed the CIFAR program (now Learning in Machines and Brains) since 2014 (E2). CIFAR's own timeline calls LeCun a program co-director (E3) and says Bengio, Hinton and LeCun came together at CIFAR in 2004 (E4). Under the criteria, a CIFAR role recorded as program co-director rather than fellow counts as mostly true.