Geoffrey Hinton

Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist who is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of artificial neural networks and deep learning. He was born on 6 December 1947 and is a descendant of George Boole, the inventor of Boolean algebra. He received his BA degree in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge and his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh University. He has worked at various institutions, including Carnegie Mellon University, Sussex University, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Since 2013, he has divided his time between Google Brain and the University of Toronto. He has made many influential contributions to the field of machine learning, such as backpropagation, Boltzmann machines, contrastive divergence, dropout, capsules, and transformers. He has received numerous awards and honors for his work, such as the Turing Award (2018), the IEEE/RSE James Clerk Maxwell Medal (2016), the Order of Canada (2018), and the Royal Society Fellowship (2001).

In May 2023, Hinton declared his departure from Google, with the intent to "openly address the dangers of A.I.". He has expressed worries about the potential for intentional misuse by harmful entities, the threat of job displacement due to technology, and the existential threat posed by the development of artificial general intelligence.

Research & papers

Sources

• Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton

• Sky News https://news.sky.com/story/the-story-of-the-british-godfather-of-ai-whos-not-sat-down-since-2005-12249571

• Forum of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine https://faimglobal.org/geoffrey-hinton/

• Home Page of Geoffrey Hinton https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/