Geoffrey Hinton, physics laureate and the “Godfather of AI,” is internationally renowned as a pioneer in the field of deep learning as a mode of artificial intelligence. With John J. Hopfield, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks,” including his invention of the Boltzmann machine using statistical physics techniques.

In 2018, Hinton received the Association for Computing Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award, often called the “Nobel Prize in Computing,” alongside Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun “for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.”

Hinton received his BA in experimental psychology from the University of Cambridge in 1970 and his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978. After completing postdoctoral work at Sussex University and the University of California San Diego, he spent five years as a faculty member in the Computer Science department at Carnegie Mellon University. He then became a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and moved to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 1987.

Hinton spent three years from 1998 until 2001 setting up the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London and then returned to the University of Toronto, where he was named a university professor in 2006 and is now university professor emeritus.

Since 2017, Hinton has been chief scientific advisor at the Vector Institute in Toronto.

Photo: Johnny Guatto, University of Toronto.

Read more about Geoffrey Hinton and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.