Geoffrey Hinton

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Geoffrey Hinton

CC FRS FRSC
Geoffrey Hinton at UBC.jpg
Hinton in 2013
Born
Geoffrey Everest Hinton

(1947-12-06) 6 December 1947 (age 73)[1]
Wimbledon, London
Alma mater
  • University of Cambridge (BA)
  • University of Edinburgh (PhD)
Known for
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
InstitutionsUniversity of Toronto
Google
Carnegie Mellon University
University College London
University of California, San Diego
ThesisRelaxation and its role in vision (1977)
Doctoral advisorChristopher Longuet-Higgins[3][4][5]
Doctoral students
Other notable students
Websitewww.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/

Geoffrey Everest Hinton CC FRS FRSC[11] (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. Since 2013, he has divided his time working for Google (Google Brain) and the University of Toronto. In 2017, he co-founded and became the Chief Scientific Advisor of the in Toronto.[12][13]

With David Rumelhart and Ronald J. Williams, Hinton was co-author of a highly cited paper published in 1986 that popularized the backpropagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural networks,[14] although they were not the first to propose the approach.[15] Hinton is viewed as a leading figure in the deep learning community.[16][17][18][19][20] The dramatic image-recognition milestone of the AlexNet designed in collaboration with his students Alex Krizhevsky[21] and Ilya Sutskever for the ImageNet challenge 2012[22] was a breakthrough in the field of computer vision.[23]

Hinton received the 2018 Turing Award, together with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, for their work on deep learning.[24] They are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning",[25][26] and have continued to give public talks together.[27]

Education[]

Hinton was educated at King's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in experimental psychology.[1] He continued his study at the University of Edinburgh where he was awarded a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence in 1978 for research supervised by Christopher Longuet-Higgins.[3][28]

Career and research[]

After his Ph.D. he worked at the University of Sussex, and (after difficulty finding funding in Britain)[29] the University of California, San Diego, and Carnegie Mellon University.[1] He was the founding director of the Gatsby Charitable Foundation Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London,[1] and is currently[30] a professor in the computer science department at the University of Toronto. He holds a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning, and is currently an advisor for the Learning in Machines & Brains program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Hinton taught a free online course on Neural Networks on the education platform Coursera in 2012.[31] 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".[32]

Hinton's research investigates ways of using neural networks for machine learning, memory, perception and symbol processing. He has authored or co-authored over 200 peer reviewed publications.[2][33]

While Hinton was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University (1982–1987), David E. Rumelhart and Hinton and Ronald J. Williams applied the backpropagation algorithm to multi-layer neural networks. Their experiments showed that such networks can learn useful internal representations of data.[14] In an interview of 2018,[34] Hinton said that "David E. Rumelhart came up with the basic idea of backpropagation, so it's his invention." Although this work was important in popularizing backpropagation, it was not the first to suggest the approach.[15] Reverse-mode automatic differentiation, of which backpropagation is a special case, was proposed by Seppo Linnainmaa in 1970, and Paul Werbos proposed to use it to train neural networks in 1974.[15]

During the same period, Hinton co-invented Boltzmann machines with David Ackley and Terry Sejnowski.[35] His other contributions to neural network research include distributed representations, time delay neural network, mixtures of experts, Helmholtz machines and Product of Experts. In 2007 Hinton coauthored an unsupervised learning paper titled Unsupervised learning of image transformations.[36] An accessible introduction to Geoffrey Hinton's research can be found in his articles in Scientific American in September 1992 and October 1993.[37]

In October and November 2017 respectively, Hinton published two open access research papers[38][39] on the theme of capsule neural networks, which according to Hinton are "finally something that works well."[40]

Notable former PhD students and postdoctoral researchers from his group include Peter Dayan,[41] Sam Roweis,[41] Richard Zemel,[3][6] Brendan Frey,[7] Radford M. Neal,[8] Ruslan Salakhutdinov,[9] Ilya Sutskever,[10] Yann LeCun[42] and Zoubin Ghahramani.

Honours and awards[]

From left to right Russ Salakhutdinov, Richard S. Sutton, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Steve Jurvetson in 2016

Hinton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1998.[11] He was the first winner of the Rumelhart Prize in 2001.[43] 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 well 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.[44]

In 2001, Hinton was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Edinburgh.[45] He was the 2005 recipient of the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence lifetime-achievement award.[46] He has also been awarded the 2011 Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering.[47] In 2013, Hinton was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Université de Sherbrooke.[48]

In 2016, he was elected a foreign member of National Academy of Engineering "For contributions to the theory and practice of artificial neural networks and their application to speech recognition and computer vision".[49] He also received the 2016 IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award.[50]

He has won the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2016) in the Information and Communication Technologies category "for his pioneering and highly influential work" to endow machines with the ability to learn.[51]

Together with Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio, Hinton won the 2018 Turing Award for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.[52][53][54]

In 2018, he was awarded a Companion of the Order of Canada.[55]

Personal life[]

Hinton is the great-great-grandson both of logician George Boole,[56] whose work eventually became one of the foundations of modern computer science, and of surgeon and author James Hinton.[57] who was the father of Charles Howard Hinton. Hinton's father was Howard Hinton.[1][58] His middle name comes from another relative, George Everest.[29] He is the nephew of the economist Colin Clark.[59] He lost his first wife to ovarian cancer in 1994.[60]

Views[]

Hinton moved from the U.S. to Canada in part due to disillusionment with Ronald Reagan-era politics and disapproval of military funding of artificial intelligence.[29]

Hinton has petitioned against lethal autonomous weapons. Regarding existential risk from artificial intelligence, Hinton typically declines to make predictions more than five years into the future, noting that exponential progress makes the uncertainty too great.[61] However, in an informal conversation with the AI risk researcher Nick Bostrom in November 2015, overheard by journalist Raffi Khatchadourian,[62] he is reported to have stated that he did not expect general A.I. to be achieved for decades ("no sooner than 2070"), and that, in the context of a dichotomy earlier introduced by Bostrom between people who think managing existential risk from artificial intelligence is probably hopeless versus easy enough that it will be solved automatically, Hinton "[is] in the camp that is hopeless."[62] He has stated, "I think political systems will use it to terrorize people" and has expressed his belief that agencies like the National Security Agency are already attempting to abuse similar technology.[62]

Asked by Nick Bostrom why he continues research despite his grave concerns, Hinton stated, "I could give you the usual arguments. But the truth is that the prospect of discovery is too sweet."[62]

According to the same report, Hinton does not categorically rule out human beings controlling an artificial superintelligence, but warns that "there is not a good track record of less intelligent things controlling things of greater intelligence".[62]

References[]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e Anon (2015) "Hinton, Prof. Geoffrey Everest". Who's Who. ukwhoswho.com (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (subscription or UK public library membership required) doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.20261 (subscription required)
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b Geoffrey Hinton publications indexed by Google Scholar Edit this at Wikidata
  3. ^ Jump up to: a b c Geoffrey Hinton at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. ^ Geoffrey E. Hinton's Academic Genealogy
  5. ^ Gregory, R. L.; Murrell, J. N. (2006). "Hugh Christopher Longuet-Higgins. 11 April 1923 -- 27 March 2004: Elected FRS 1958". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 52: 149–166. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2006.0012.
  6. ^ Jump up to: a b Zemel, Richard Stanley (1994). A minimum description length framework for unsupervised learning (PhD thesis). University of Toronto. OCLC 222081343. ProQuest 304161918.
  7. ^ Jump up to: a b Frey, Brendan John (1998). Bayesian networks for pattern classification, data compression, and channel coding (PhD thesis). University of Toronto. OCLC 46557340. ProQuest 304396112.
  8. ^ Jump up to: a b Neal, Radford (1995). Bayesian learning for neural networks (PhD thesis). University of Toronto. OCLC 46499792. ProQuest 304260778.
  9. ^ Jump up to: a b Salakhutdinov, Ruslan (2009). Learning deep generative models (PhD thesis). University of Toronto. ISBN 9780494610800. OCLC 785764071. ProQuest 577365583.
  10. ^ Jump up to: a b Sutskever, Ilya (2013). Training Recurrent Neural Networks (PhD thesis). University of Toronto. OCLC 889910425. ProQuest 1501655550.
  11. ^ Jump up to: a b Anon (1998). "Professor Geoffrey Hinton FRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 3 November 2015. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:

    "All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License." --"Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies". Archived from the original on 11 November 2016. Retrieved 9 March 2016.CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  12. ^ Daniela Hernandez (7 May 2013). "The Man Behind the Google Brain: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI". Wired. Retrieved 10 May 2013.
  13. ^ "Geoffrey E. Hinton – Google AI". Google AI.
  14. ^ Jump up to: a b Rumelhart, David E.; Hinton, Geoffrey E.; Williams, Ronald J. (9 October 1986). "Learning representations by back-propagating errors". Nature. 323 (6088): 533–536. Bibcode:1986Natur.323..533R. doi:10.1038/323533a0. ISSN 1476-4687. S2CID 205001834.
  15. ^ Jump up to: a b c Schmidhuber, Jürgen (1 January 2015). "Deep learning in neural networks: An overview". Neural Networks. 61: 85–117. arXiv:1404.7828. doi:10.1016/j.neunet.2014.09.003. PMID 25462637. S2CID 11715509.
  16. ^ "Geoffrey Hinton was briefly a Google intern in 2012 because of bureaucracy – TechCrunch". techcrunch.com. Retrieved 28 March 2018.
  17. ^ Somers, James. "Progress in AI seems like it's accelerating, but here's why it could be plateauing". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 28 March 2018.
  18. ^ "How U of T's 'godfather' of deep learning is reimagining AI". University of Toronto News. Retrieved 28 March 2018.
  19. ^ "'Godfather' of deep learning is reimagining AI". Retrieved 28 March 2018.
  20. ^ "Geoffrey Hinton, the 'godfather' of deep learning, on AlphaGo". Macleans.ca. 18 March 2016. Retrieved 28 March 2018.
  21. ^ Dave Gershgorn (18 June 2018). "The inside story of how AI got good enough to dominate Silicon Valley". Quartz. Retrieved 5 October 2018.
  22. ^ Krizhevsky, Alex; Sutskever, Ilya; Hinton, Geoffrey E. (3 December 2012). "ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks". Nips'12. Curran Associates Inc.: 1097–1105. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  23. ^ "How a Toronto professor's research revolutionized artificial intelligence | Toronto Star". thestar.com. Retrieved 13 March 2018.
  24. ^ 27 Mar, Emily Chung · CBC News · Posted; March 27, 2019 6:00 AM ET | Last Updated. "Canadian researchers who taught AI to learn like humans win $1M award | CBC News". CBC. Retrieved 27 March 2019.
  25. ^ Ranosa, Ted (29 March 2019). "Godfathers Of AI Win This Year's Turing Award And $1 Million". Tech Times. Retrieved 5 November 2020.
  26. ^ Shead, Sam. "The 3 'Godfathers' Of AI Have Won The Prestigious $1M Turing Prize". Forbes. Retrieved 5 November 2020.
  27. ^ Ray, Tiernan. "Nvidia's GTC will feature deep learning cabal of LeCun, Hinton, and Bengio". ZDNet. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  28. ^ Hinton, Geoffrey Everest (1977). Relaxation and its role in vision (PhD thesis). University of Edinburgh. hdl:1842/8121. OCLC 18656113. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.482889. Free to read
  29. ^ Jump up to: a b c Smith, Craig S. (23 June 2017). "The Man Who Helped Turn Toronto into a High-Tech Hotbed". The New York Times. Retrieved 27 June 2017.
  30. ^ https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/fullcv.pdf
  31. ^ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 31 December 2016. Retrieved 30 December 2016.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  32. ^ "U of T neural networks start-up acquired by Google" (Press release). Toronto, ON. 12 March 2013. Retrieved 13 March 2013.
  33. ^ Geoffrey Hinton publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  34. ^ Ford, Martin (2018). Architects of Intelligence: The truth about AI from the people building it. Packt Publishing. ISBN 978-1-78913-151-2.
  35. ^ Ackley, David H; Hinton Geoffrey E; Sejnowski, Terrence J (1985), "A learning algorithm for Boltzmann machines", Cognitive science, Elsevier, 9 (1): 147–169
  36. ^ Hinton, Geoffrey E. "Geoffrey E. Hinton's Publications in Reverse Chronological Order".
  37. ^ "Stories by Geoffrey E. Hinton in Scientific American".
  38. ^ Sabour, Sara; Frosst, Nicholas; Hinton, Geoffrey. October 2017. "Dynamic Routing Between Capsules"
  39. ^ "Matrix capsules with EM routing" 3 November 2017. OpenReview.net
  40. ^ Geib, Claudia. 2 November 2017. "We’ve Finally Created an AI Network That’s Been Decades in the Making" Futurism.com
  41. ^ Jump up to: a b "Geoffrey Hinton's postdocs". Geoffrey Hinton.
  42. ^ "Yann LeCun's Research and Contributions". yann.lecun.com. Retrieved 13 March 2018.
  43. ^ "Current and Previous Recipients". David E. Rumelhart Prize. Archived from the original on 2 March 2017.
  44. ^ Anon (1998). "Certificate of election EC/1998/21: Geoffrey Everest Hinton". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 5 November 2015.
  45. ^ "Distinguished Edinburgh graduate receives ACM A.M. Turing Award". Retrieved 9 April 2019.
  46. ^ "IJCAI Awards | IJCAI". www.ijcai.org. Retrieved 5 August 2021.
  47. ^ "Artificial intelligence scientist gets M prize". CBC News. 14 February 2011.
  48. ^ "Geoffrey Hinton, keystone researcher in artificial intelligence, visits the Université de Sherbrooke". Université de Sherbrooke. 19 February 2014.
  49. ^ "National Academy of Engineering Elects 80 Members and 22 Foreign Members". NAE. 8 February 2016.
  50. ^ "2016 IEEE Medals and Recognitions Recipients and Citations" (PDF). IEEE. Retrieved 7 July 2016.
  51. ^ "The BBVA Foundation bestows its award on the architect of the first machines capable of learning the way people do". BBVA Foundation. 17 January 2017.
  52. ^ "Vector Institutes Chief Scientific Advisor Dr.Geoffrey Hinton Receives ACM A.M. Turing Award Alongside Dr.Yoshua Bengio and Dr.Yann Lecun". NAE. 27 March 2019.
  53. ^ "Three Pioneers in Artificial Intelligence Win Turing Award". New York Times. 27 March 2019. Retrieved 27 March 2019.
  54. ^ "Fathers of the Deep Learning Revolution Receive ACM A.M. Turing Award - Bengio, Hinton and LeCun Ushered in Major Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence". Association for Computing Machinery. 27 March 2019. Retrieved 27 March 2019.
  55. ^ "Governor General Announces 103 New Appointments to the Order of Canada, December 2018".
  56. ^ "Geoffrey Hinton: The story of the British 'Godfather of AI' - who's not sat down since 2005". Sky News. Retrieved 7 April 2021.
  57. ^ The Isaac Newton of logic
  58. ^ Salt, George (1978). "Howard Everest Hinton. 24 August 1912-2 August 1977". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 24: 150–182. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1978.0006. ISSN 0080-4606.
  59. ^ Shute, Joe (26 August 2017). "The 'Godfather of AI' on making machines clever and whether robots really will learn to kill us all?". The Telegraph. Retrieved 20 December 2017.
  60. ^ Shute, Joe (26 August 2017). "The 'Godfather of AI' on making machines clever and whether robots really will learn to kill us all?". The Telegraph. Retrieved 30 January 2018.
  61. ^ Hinton, Geoffrey. "Lecture 16d The fog of progress" (PDF).
  62. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e Khatchadourian, Raffi (16 November 2015). "The Doomsday Invention". The New Yorker. Retrieved 30 January 2018.
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