Geoffrey Hinton
Computer scientist, Turing Award 2018 and Nobel Prize in Physics 2024
Born 1947
Photo: Cmichel67 · CC BY-SA 4.0
«I console myself with the normal excuse: if I hadn't done it, somebody else would have.»
Geoffrey Hinton spent forty years developing neural networks while most researchers considered them a dead end, and was proved right when his students won an image recognition competition by an enormous margin in 2012. He later left Google to speak freely about the risks of the technology.
Key achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physics, 2024, for neural networks
- Turing Award, 2018, with Bengio and LeCun
Universities
Toronto, Ontario
Professor of computer science from 1987, where his group's 2012 image recognition result started the deep learning boom.
Cambridge, England
Read experimental psychology at King's College, after switching between several subjects.
Edinburgh, Scotland
Took his PhD in artificial intelligence in 1978, working on neural networks when the field was out of favour.
Facts
- He changed subject several times at Cambridge, moving between natural sciences, architecture, physics, philosophy and finally psychology.
- A back condition means he has not sat down since 2005; he works standing and lies down to travel.
- He and two students sold their three-person company to Google in an auction after the 2012 result, without any product.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.