Historical Figure
Geoffrey Hinton
b. 1947
British-Canadian computer scientist (born 1947)
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Biography
Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, cognitive psychologist and Nobel Prize laureate known for his work on artificial neural networks, which earned him the title "the Godfather of AI". He is University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.
Timeline
The story of Geoffrey Hinton, told in moments.
Started his PhD in artificial intelligence at Edinburgh. Most researchers thought neural networks were a dead end. His supervisor told him to work on something else.
Co-authored the paper on backpropagation that made deep learning practical. It showed how a neural network could learn by adjusting its own internal connections.
His student team won the ImageNet competition by a margin that stunned the field. Their deep neural network slashed the error rate from 26% to 16%. Google hired him immediately.
Won the Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational work on artificial neural networks. Then publicly warned that the technology he helped create might pose an existential risk to humanity.
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