Geoffrey Hinton

Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. From 2013 to 2023, he divided his time working forGoogle(Google Brain) and theUniversity 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 theVector Institutein Toronto.

With David Rumelhart and Ronald J. Williams, Hinton was co-author of a highly cited paper published in 1986 that popularised thebackpropagationalgorithm 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 dramatic image-recognition milestone of theAlexNetdesigned 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 the2018 Turing Award(often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing"), together withYoshua BengioandYann 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.

Notable former PhD students and postdoctoral researchers from his group include Peter Dayan, Sam Roweis, Max Welling, Richard Zemel, Brendan Frey, Radford M. Neal, Yee Whye Teh, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Ilya Sutskever, Yann LeCun, Alex Graves, and Zoubin Ghahramani.