A Conversation with the Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton (KC 1967, Natural Sciences)
Dubbed the British "godfather of AI" and a pioneer of deep learning, Geoff until recently divided his time between work as an academic at the University of Toronto, in the Department of Computer Science (Emeritus Professor) and a role at Google, where he was the part-time Vice President and Engineering Fellow, managing Brain Team Toronto, now a part of the Google Brain Team.
Earlier this month, Geoff announced his resignation from Google in a statement to the New York Times.
Geoff came up to King's to read Psychology and during his studies realised that scientists didn't really understand the brain. How neurons learned or computed could not be explained and he has spent his career trying to better understand these processes. From Cambridge he went on to the University of Edinburgh to pursue a doctorate in artificial intelligence, followed by postdoc appointments at the University of Sussex and the University of California San Diego. Geoff subsequently spent five years in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie-Mellon University, before making the move to Toronto where he has been ever since, apart from a three-year spell at UCL (1998-2001) where he set up the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit.
Geoff was one of the researchers who introduced the backpropagation algorithm and the first to use backpropagation for learning word embeddings. His other contributions to neural network research include Boltzmann machines, distributed representations, time-delay neural nets, mixtures of experts, variational learning and deep learning. His research group in Toronto made major breakthroughs in deep learning that revolutionized speech recognition and object classification.
A co-founder of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Geoff has received numerous awards, including the 2018 Turing Award (received jointly with two colleagues), as well as featuring in the 2016 Wired 100 list of global influencers. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by the universities of Sussex and Edinburgh.
here.
WHEN: Friday 26 May 2023
5.30 PM: Wine reception in Chetwynd Room
6.00 PM: Interview followed by Q&A in Keynes Lecture Theatre
WHERE: King's College, University of Cambridge
WATCH: watch the recording of the event, below or here.