Geoffrey Hinton

Geoff Hinton
File:Geoffrey Hinton at UBC.jpg
Born	Geoffrey Everest Hinton (1947-12-06) 6 December 1947 Wimbledon, London
Residence	Canada
Fields	Machine learning Neural networks Artificial intelligence Cognitive science Object recognition
Alma mater	University of Cambridge (BA) University of Edinburgh (PhD)
Thesis	Relaxation and its role in vision (1977)
Doctoral advisor	H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins
Doctoral students	David Ackley Peter Brown Richard Szeliski Mark Derthick Kevin Lang Steven Nowlan David Plaut Sidney Fels Sue Becker Rich Zemel Carl Edward Rasmussen Chris Williams Brendan Frey Radek Grzeszczuk Brian Sallans Sageev Oore Alberto Paccanaro Yee Whye Teh Ruslan Salakhutdinov Ilya Sutskever
Other notable students	Yann LeCun (postdoc) Zoubin Ghahramani (postdoc) Radford M. Neal
Known for	Backpropagation Boltzmann machine Deep learning
Notable awards	FRS (1998) AAAI Fellow (1990) Rumelhart Prize (2001) IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (2005)
Website www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/

Geoffrey Everest Hinton FRS (born 6 December 1947) is a British-born cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. As of 2015 he divides his time working for Google and University of Toronto. He was one of the first researchers who demonstrated the use of generalized backpropagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural nets and is an important figure in the deep learning movement.

Education

Hinton was educated at King's College, Cambridge graduating in 1970, with a Bachelor of Arts in experimental psychology. He continued his study at the University of Edinburgh where he was awarded a PhD in artificial intelligence in 1977 for research supervised by H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins.

Career

He has worked at Sussex, University of California San Diego, Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon University and University College London. He was the founding director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London, and is currently a professor in the computer science department at the University of Toronto. He holds a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning. He is the director of the program on "Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception" which is funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Hinton taught a free online course on Neural Networks on the education platform Coursera in 2012. Hinton joined Google in March 2013 when his company, DNNresearch Inc, was acquired. He is planning to "divide his time between his university research and his work at Google".

Research

An accessible introduction to Geoffrey Hinton's research can be found in his articles in Scientific American in September 1992 and October 1993. He investigates ways of using neural networks for learning, memory, perception and symbol processing and has authored over 200 publications in these areas. He was one of the first researchers who demonstrated the use of generalized back-propagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural networks that has been widely used for practical applications. He co-invented Boltzmann machines with Terry Sejnowski. His other contributions to neural network research include distributed representations, time delay neural network, mixtures of experts, Helmholtz machines and Product of Experts. His current main interest is in unsupervised learning procedures for neural networks with rich sensory input.

Honours and awards

Hinton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1998. Hinton was the first winner of the David E. Rumelhart Prize. His certificate of election for the Royal Society reads:

Geoffrey E. Hinton is internationally distinguished for his work on artificial neural nets, especially how they can be designed to learn without the aid of a human teacher. This may will be the start of autonomous intelligent brain-like machines. He has compared effects of brain damage with effects of losses in such a net, and found striking similarities with human impairment, such as for recognition of names and losses of categorization. His work includes studies of mental imagery, and inventing puzzles for testing originality and creative intelligence. It is conceptual, mathematically sophisticated and experimental. He brings these skills together with striking effect to produce important work of great interest.

In 2001, Hinton was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Edinburgh.

Hinton was the 2005 recipient of the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence lifetime-achievement award.

He has also been awarded the 2011 Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering.

In 2013, Hinton was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Université de Sherbrooke.

Personal life

Hinton is the great-great-grandson both of logician George Boole whose work eventually became one of the foundations of modern computer science, and of surgeon and author James Hinton. His father is Howard Hinton.