In the field of artificial intelligence, one major player is Geoffrey Hinton.

Dr. Hinton is an Emeritus Distinguished professor at the University of Toronto,

where he works half-time, as he is also an Engineering Fellow in the artificial

intelligence division at Google. He also began the Neural Computation and

Adaptive Perception Program in 2004, which brings the top researchers in AI

together to share concepts and research.

Geoffrey Hinton attended Cambridge where he received his BA in

Experimental Psychology in 1970. He went on to receive a PhD in Artificial

Intelligence from Edinburgh in 1978. He did postdoctoral work at both Sussex

University, and The University of California San Diego. Next, he spent five

years as a faculty member of Carnegie-Mellon Universitys computer science

department. He became a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced

Research, and moved to the department of computer science at Toronto. He

spent 1998-2001 setting up the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in

London, and returned to the University of Toronto as an Emeritus

Distinguished professor. He remains at the University part time today, as well

as working part time at Google (Hinton).

Geoffrey Hinton was an undergrad at Cambridge studying psychology,

when he first realized scientists did not know how the brain worked. The

brain fascinated him. He continued his research into how the brain learns

and interprets data, and has applied that to his work on creating neural nets.

Neural nets are software connections that operate on multiple levels. Hinton

has created artificial neural nets can gather information and react to it
without asking a human to label what is happening (Hernandez). Hinton is

considered a pioneer of Deep learning, which is a more involved branch of

machine learning that uses algorithms to more closely mimic how the brain

interprets data (Schmidhuber). Deep learning is currently ebeing used in

voice recognition and image tagging. Dr. Hinton created a neural network

that could do true recursion by using weights to store the information in

between. He was solving a problem before the rest of the world knew it was

a problem (High).

Dr. Hinton, and most of the big names in artificial intelligence and deep

learning research agree, that open access to others research is the only way

to move forward quickly. Hinton started the Neural Computation and

Adaptive Perception Program [NCAP] in 2004 and brought together computer

scientists, biologists, electrical engineers, neuroscientists, physicists,

psychologists to share ideas and research (Hernandez). They are hoping to

move quickly on artificial intelligence, and bring AI to everything.

In the article, Deep Learning, (Bengio, Hinton and LeCun), artificial

neural networks are discussed, as well as how very useful this technology

can be to almost every field. Science, business, government, medicine

question-answering, and language translation are all areas that could benefit

from programs with deep learning neural networks. Programs that can learn

to identify objects are easier than programming each data set in by hand.

These programs have already made advancements in image and voice

recognition, and the sky is the limit on the applications for this technology.
Artificial intelligence will be brought about through systems that can

combine representation learning with complex reasoning. It seems we are

well on our way.

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/NatureDeepReview.pdf

Geoffrey Hinton can be reached at: geoffhinton@google.com or

hinton@cs.toronto.edu

Works Cited
Bengio, Y, G Hinton and Y LeCun. "Deep Learning." Nature 521 (2015): 436.
Hernandez, Daniela. "Wired." 16 Jan 2014. Meet the Man Google Hired to
Make AI A Reality. 26 Feb 2017.
<https://www.wired.com/2014/01/geoffrey-hinton-deep-learning/>.
High, Peter. "forbes.com." 20 Jun 2016. Deep Learning Pioneer Geoff Hinton
Helps Shape Google's Drive To Put AI Everywhere. 2017 Feb 2017.
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2016/06/20/deep-learning-
pioneer-geoff-hinton-helps-shape-googles-drive-to-put-ai-
everywhere/2/#2ec23d8fe6b2>.
Hinton, Geoffrey. "cs.toronto.edu." n.d. Geoffrey Hinton's Biographical
Sketch. 26 Feb 2017. <https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/bio.html>.
Schmidhuber, Jurgen. "Neural Netowrks." Jan 2015. Deep Learning in Neural
Networks: An Overview. otc.edu. 26 Feb 2017.
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0893608014002135
>.