Technology

Posted on March 28, 2019 by staff

British-born AI expert wins ‘Nobel Prize of computing’

Technology

A British-Canadian AI expert has won the Turing Award for his work with neural networks and machine learning.

Geoffrey Hinton, who now lives in Canada, received the award which he shares with fellow AI experts Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun.

Prof Hinton is VP and Engineering Fellow of Google, Chief Scientific Adviser of The Vector Institute and a University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.

He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society, was selected by Wired magazine for “The Wired 100—2016’s Most Influential People” and by Bloomberg for the 50 people who changed the landscape of global business in 2017.

In 2012, along with his students, Hinton devised a way to halve the error-rate of machine-based object recognition, reshaping the computer vision field.

The award carries a $1 million prize and financial support provided by Google, Inc.

It is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing.

“I think it’s great that the computer science community has recognised that this stuff is not flaky,” he told BBC News.

“For many years, they thought that neural nets were not respectable.

“I think we’re just at the beginning of a big revolution.”

Hinton’s great-great-grandfather, British mathematician George Boole, invented ‘Boolean logic’, which later became a key concept in computer science.