St John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital Group Ophthalmic Association - Canada
Geoffrey Hinton, CC FRS FRSC
Nobel Prize-winning godfather of deep learning
British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, Geoffrey Hinton is most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. From 2013 to 2023, he divided his time working for Google (Google Brain) and the University of Toronto, before publicly announcing his departure from Google in May 2023, citing concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. In 2017, he co-founded and became the chief scientific advisor of the Vector Institute in Toronto.
With David Rumelhart and Ronald J. Williams, Hinton was co-author of a highly cited paper published in 1986 that popularised the backpropagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural networks, although they were not the first to propose the approach. Hinton is viewed as a leading figure in the deep learning community. The dramatic image-recognition milestone of the AlexNet designed in collaboration with his students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever for the ImageNet challenge 2012 was a breakthrough in the field of computer vision.
Hinton received the 2018 Turing Award, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing", together with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, for their work on deep learning. They are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of Deep Learning", and have continued to give public talks together.
In May 2023, Hinton announced his resignation from Google to be able to "freely speak out about the risks of A.I.” He has voiced concerns about deliberate misuse by malicious actors, technological unemployment, and existential risk from artificial general intelligence.
In October 2024, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield (Princeton University) were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for "foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks."