Geoffrey Hinton, a British-Canadian researcher known as the Godfather of AI whose findings helped spur technological revolution, has won the Nobel Prize in physics.
Hinton, who has spent most of his career at University of Toronto, was awarded the prize along with Princeton University researcher John Hopfield for their work laying the foundations that allow for machine learning using artificial neural networks.
“I’m flabbergasted. I had, no idea this would happen,” Hinton said when reached by the Nobel committee on the phone Tuesday.
Ellen Moons, a member of the committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two laureates “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets.”…