Geoffrey Everest Hinton CC FRS FRSC (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, psychologist and most noted for his work on artificial neural networks, which has earned him the title as the "Godfather of AI".

Hinton is currently University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto. 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 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. He was also awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with John Hopfield.

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. He noted that establishing safety guidelines will require cooperation among those competing in use of AI in order to avoid the worst outcomes.

• From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton, accessed 9 October 2024

Awards

• 1988: Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)
• 2001: Rumelhart Prize
• 2005: IJCAI Award for Research Excellence lifetime-achievement award.[
• 2011: Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering.
• 2012: Canada Council Killam Prize in Engineering.
• 2016: Foreign member of National Academy of Engineering.
• 2016: IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award.
• 2016: BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award.
• 2018: Turing Award
• 2018: Companion of the Order of Canada.
• 2021: Dickson Prize in Science from the Carnegie Mellon University.
• 2022: the Princess of Asturias Award in the Scientific Research category.
• 2023: ACM Fellow.
• 2024: Nobel Prize in Physics (with John Hopfield "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks."