Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, FRSC, University of Toronto, has been awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, sharing the honour with Dr. John J. Hopfield of Princeton University for their “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”
“I extend my heartfelt congratulations to Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Toronto on being awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, a well-deserved honour he shares with Dr. John J. Hopfield from Princeton University,” said RSC President Alain-G. Gagnon. “This prestigious recognition celebrates Dr. Hinton’s pivotal contributions to the field of artificial intelligence. Many people have highlighted his desire to support curiosity-driven research and his incredible contribution to training so many AI leaders over the years. We are very proud to celebrate the achievements of Dr. Hinton, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1996.”
Johnny Guatto, University of Toronto
Dr. Hinton's groundbreaking work has enabled machines to move beyond data analysis to generate new content, such as creating realistic images, predicting trends, and designing innovative solutions—tasks once reserved for human creativity. His principles are now integral to technologies like facial recognition, voice assistants, language translation, self-driving cars, and generative AI, including OpenAI's ChatGPT.
“The contribution of the Nobel co-awardee John Hopfield was to set up means to store and retrieve information from multiple computer nodes. The work of Geoffrey Hinton was significant as it established new ways to feed datasets and information to computers in ways that could be reiterated, manipulated, and retrieved,” said Dr. Michel Tremblay, President of the RSC Academy of Science. “This allowed successive modifications and improvements in the computer output, now known as “machine learning” or as a general term for “Artificial Intelligence.” Therefore, this recognition of Hopfield and Hinton as fathers of AI merited the co-award of the Nobel Prize in Physics.”
Dr. Hinton was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1996 and was then elected to the Royal Society of London in 1998.
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