Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, renowned for his work on artificial neural networks. He is often called the “Godfather of AI” for his foundational contributions to the development of the field. More at toronto-future.
Education and Career. Early Research
Hinton was educated at Clifton College in Bristol and King’s College, Cambridge, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in experimental psychology in 1970. He later obtained a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh.
Throughout his career, Hinton has worked at the University of Sussex, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Toronto. Furthermore, he co-authored the landmark 1986 paper on the backpropagation algorithm and was a co-inventor of Boltzmann machines in 1985. In 2012, his work on AlexNet revolutionized the field of computer vision. A short time later, Geoffrey Hinton joined Google following the acquisition of his company, DNNresearch Inc.
In his research, the scientist focuses on neural networks, machine learning, and artificial general intelligence (AGI). In May 2023, Hinton left Google to draw attention to the risks associated with AI technologies.
Awards and Honours
Hinton is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 2018, he received the Turing Award, alongside Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, for their achievements in deep learning. 2024 marked a major turning point for Geoffrey, as he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics alongside John Hopfield for their foundational research on neural networks.
A Tragic Personal Life. Astonishing Family Ties
Hinton’s first wife, Rosalind Zalin, with whom he had spent many happy years, died of ovarian cancer in 1994, leading the scientist to remarry. This time, tragedy struck Geoffrey’s family again… His second wife, Jacqueline “Jackie” Ford, also passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2018.
However, the researcher’s family connections are far more fascinating. Hinton himself is the great-great-grandson of mathematician and educator Mary Everest Boole and her husband, logician George Boole. George Boole’s work became one of the cornerstones of modern computer science. Another of Hinton’s great-grandfathers was the surgeon and author James Hinton, who was the father of mathematician Charles Howard Hinton. Geoffrey’s father was the entomologist Howard Hinton. He received his middle name, Everest, in honour of a relative, George Everest, the Surveyor General of India after whom the world’s highest mountain is named. The scientist is also the nephew of economist Colin Clark.
The Beginning of the Journey, or How Does the Brain Work?
Hinton began to think seriously about how the brain works while still in school. A conversation with a friend convinced him that memories are stored in the brain through a vast number of neural connections, similar to how information for creating a hologram is distributed in a database. While searching for information about the brain, Hinton realized that modern science was still filled with countless unanswered questions. Psychologists and neurobiologists had not yet been able to explain precisely where human intelligence comes from.
Throughout his career, first as a student and later as a professor, Hinton sought to find answers by modeling the brain’s structure on computers. His idea was to create artificial neural networks that mimic the neural connections in the head. Furthermore, Geoffrey believed that if computers were given the right structure, they could learn and develop intelligence just like humans. He even noted that in science, you can talk about things that seem crazy, because over time they might turn out to be true.
In 2004, after more than twenty years of working in relative obscurity, Hinton was on the verge of a huge breakthrough. The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) provided him with funding to create a program that brought together computer scientists, psychologists, neurobiologists, and experts from other fields to investigate his theories. Thus, the Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception (NCAP) program was founded, which became one of the leading programs in the field of artificial intelligence. Over the next decade, the team developed deep learning algorithms, applying them to large datasets so that the models could learn, for example, to understand human language in the same way the brain does. This work yielded extraordinary results. NCAP’s innovations laid the foundation for many of today’s AI-based tools. Thanks to the program, influential researchers like Andrew Ng, who later founded Google Brain, gained prominence. (As previously mentioned, Hinton’s own company, DNNresearch, was later acquired by Google, where Ng established the Toronto division of Google Brain).
Overall, his influence on artificial intelligence research is so profound that some people in the field talk about the “six degrees of Geoffrey Hinton,” much like students once referenced Kevin Bacon’s connections to many Hollywood films.