Geoffrey Hinton

Hinton's great-great-grandparents, Mary Everest Boole and George Boole, made significant contributions to modern computer science through their work, which became foundational in the field.

Geoffrey Everest Hinton was born on December 6, 1947, in London, England.

In 1970, Geoffrey Hinton graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in experimental psychology after trying various subjects. This laid the foundation for his future work in artificial intelligence.

In 1972, Geoffrey Hinton began his Ph.D. in AI at the University of Edinburgh, focusing on neural networks, despite the period of dampened enthusiasm for artificial intelligence at that time.

Geoffrey Hinton earned his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978.

Geoffrey Hinton, along with psychologist David Rumelhart and computer scientist Ronald J. Williams, developed an algorithm called 'backpropagation' at Carnegie Mellon University. This algorithm laid the groundwork for neural network development.

Hinton moved from the U.S. to Canada in part due to disillusionment with Ronald Reagan-era politics and disapproval of military funding of artificial intelligence. This relocation had a significant impact on his life and career.

Geoffrey Hinton introduced the backpropagation algorithm in 1986, which is a widely used method for training neural networks.

In July 1987, Geoffrey Hinton took a professorship at the University of Toronto, where he made major breakthroughs in deep learning that revolutionized speech recognition and object classification.

Hinton's second wife, Rosalind Zalin, passed away in 1994 due to ovarian cancer, marking a significant personal loss for Hinton.

He spent three years from 1998 until 2001 setting up the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London.

In 2001, Geoffrey Hinton was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh for his outstanding contributions to the field of artificial intelligence.

Geoffrey Hinton founded the Neural Computational and Adaptive Perception program, which became a prominent force in the field of artificial intelligence. The program focused on developing deep learning algorithms and applying them to large datasets with the goal of mimicking human language processing.

In 2005, Geoffrey Hinton received the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence lifetime-achievement award, recognizing his significant and enduring contributions to the field of artificial intelligence.

In 2011, Geoffrey Hinton was honored with the Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering, acknowledging his exceptional achievements and advancements in the fields of science and engineering.

In 2012, Geoffrey Hinton and his graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever, achieved a significant victory by dominating the ImageNet competition, showcasing the maturity of neural networks in image recognition AI systems.

In March 2013, Geoffrey Hinton joined Google when his company, DNNresearch Inc., was acquired, marking a significant transition in his career.

In 2014, Geoffrey Hinton was awarded the Royal Society's Royal Medal for his pioneering contributions to deep learning.

He was interviewed on CBC radio 'The Current' on May 5, 2015.

In 2016, Geoffrey Hinton was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category, recognizing his pioneering and highly influential work in endowing machines with the ability to learn.

In June 2017, the New York Times highlighted Geoffrey Hinton's significant impact on artificial intelligence research, comparing it to the concept of 'six degrees of Geoffrey Hinton.' This illustrates the widespread influence and connections he has within the field.

In October 2017, Geoffrey Hinton published an open access research paper on the theme of capsule neural networks, contributing to advancements in this area of study.

In September 2018, Hinton's third wife, Jackie, also succumbed to cancer. This event had a profound impact on Hinton's personal life.

In 2022, Geoffrey Hinton, along with Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, and Demis Hassabis, received the Princess of Asturias Award in the Scientific Research category, in recognition of their remarkable contributions and significant impact on scientific research.

On May 1, 2023, Geoffrey Hinton announced his resignation from Google in order to openly address the dangers of AI without being influenced by Google's interests, expressing regret over the potential consequences of his life's work and raising concerns about the competition between technology giants.

Geoffrey Hinton is appointed as an Emeritus Professor at the University of Toronto on September 7, 2023.