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| Geoffrey Hinton | Photo: Reuters |
Geoffrey E. Hinton of the University of Toronto, Canada, and John J. Hopfield of Princeton University, USA, have won the Nobel Prize in Physics this year for their work on the fundamental foundations of artificial neural networks for artificial intelligence (AI) technology, or machine learning. They each received $500,000 for their joint Nobel Prize. Geoffrey E. Hinton has used the $500,000 from the Nobel Prize to launch a new award for researchers who have contributed to the development of artificial intelligence.
The award, established by Geoffrey E. Hinton, known as the godfather of artificial intelligence, has been named the Sejnowski-Hinton Prize. The prize, which comes with a $10,000 stipend, will be awarded annually to two or more researchers under the age of 40. The award was announced at the Neural IPS conference held recently in Vancouver, Canada.
The Sejnowski-Hinton Prize is awarded to Hinton and Terry Sejnowski. Terry is a researcher in computational neuroscience. He worked with Hinton on Boltzmann machines. The remainder of Hinton's Nobel Prize will be donated to charity. The prize money will initially go to the Canadian non-profit organization Water First, which works to solve water problems for indigenous communities.
The full name of British-Canadian scientist Geoffrey Hinton is Geoffrey Everest Hinton. He was born on December 6, 1947. A computer scientist and psychologist, Hinton is called the 'Godfather of AI'. He received a BA degree in Experimental Psychology in 1970. Later, he received a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978.
After teaching for a long time at the University of Sussex, the University of California, San Diego, and Carnegie Mellon University, he joined Google in 2013. In 1985, he jointly created a neural network called Boltzmann Machine with David Ackley and Terry Sejnowski. In 2018, Hinton also received the Turing Award, known as the Nobel Prize of the computer world.