Geoffrey Everest Hinton Federal Reserve System is a British-born cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks.
Education
Hinton was educated at King"s College, Cambridge graduating in 1970, with a Bachelor of Arts in experimental psychology. He continued his study at the where he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in artificial intelligence in 1977 for research supervised by H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins.
Career
As of 2015 he divides his time working for Google and University of Toronto. He was one of the first researchers who demonstrated the use of generalized backpropagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural nets and is an important figure in the deep learning community. He has worked at Sussex, University of California San Diego, Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon University and University College London.
He was the founding director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London, and is currently a professor in the computer science department at the University of Toronto.
He holds a Canada Chair in Machine Learning. He is the director of the program on "Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception" which is funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Hinton taught a free online course on Neural Networks on the education platform Coursera in 2012.
Hinton joined Google in March 2013 when his company, DNNresearch Incorporated, was acquired. He is planning to "divide his time between his university research and his work at Google".
An accessible introduction to Geoffrey Hinton"s research can be found in his articles in Scientific American in September 1992 and October 1993.
He investigates ways of using neural networks for learning, memory, perception and symbol processing and has authored over 200 publications in these areas. He was one of the first researchers who demonstrated the use of generalized back-propagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural networks that has been widely used for practical applications. He co-invented Boltzmann machines with Terry Sejnowski.
His other contributions to neural network research include distributed representations, time delay neural network, mixtures of experts, Helmholtz machines and Product of Experts.
His current main interest is in unsupervised learning procedures for neural networks with rich sensory input. Hinton is the great-great-grandson both of logician George Boole whose work eventually became one of the foundations of modern computer science, and of surgeon and author James Hinton.
His father is Howard Hinton.
Membership
Royal Society]
In 2016, He was elected a foreign member of national academy of engineering "Foreign contributions to the theory and practice of artificial neural networks and their application to speech recognition and computer vision.".