Professor Geoffrey E. Hinton (Canada), recipient of the VinFuture 2024 Grand Prize, has just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024.
This marks the fifth scientist who has received the VinFuture Grand Prize and subsequently awarded a Nobel Prize. Previously, Professor Katalin Karikó and Professor Drew Weissman, recipients of the VinFuture Grand Prize 2021; Dr. Demis Hassabis (UK) and Dr. John Jumper (USA), recipients of the VinFuture Grand Prize 2022, were also awarded Nobel Prizes.
Professor Geoffrey E. Hinton (Canada), recipient of the VinFuture Grand Prize 2024, has just received the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024. (Photo: AP)
This accomplishment highlights the visionary leadership of the founders of the VinFuture Prize – the first international science and technology award initiated by Vietnamese individuals, establishing a significant mark in the global scientific community within just four years of operation.
Geoffrey Hinton is often referred to as the “godfather of deep learning” due to his substantial contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Professor Geoffrey E. Hinton, along with four other scientists: Yoshua Bengio, Jen-Hsun Huang, Yann LeCun, and Fei-Fei Li, has been recognized with the main award, valued at $3 million (over 76 billion VND), for VinFuture 2024, which honors advancements in deep learning.
Geoffrey Hinton is often referred to as the “godfather of deep learning” due to his substantial contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The award council acknowledged him for his leadership and foundational research on neural network architecture. His paper published in 1986, co-authored with David Rumelhart and Ronald Williams, demonstrated how distributed representations in neural networks could be trained using the backpropagation algorithm. This method has become a standard tool in the field of artificial intelligence and has led to advancements in image and voice recognition.
Born on December 6, 1947, in Wimbledon, London, Hinton is a descendant of the logician George Boole, who laid the groundwork for digital circuit design theory. He is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, widely recognized for his pioneering research in artificial intelligence (AI).
Five scientists received the VinFuture Grand Prize 2024 at the award ceremony on December 6 (Professor Geoffrey E. Hinton’s name and image are second on the screen).
One of Hinton’s most notable predictions is that AI will soon be able to understand and produce natural language at a level comparable to humans. This prediction is based on the rapid advancements in machine learning and reinforcement learning algorithms.
Another area of Hinton’s research is unsupervised learning, a type of machine learning where algorithms learn from unlabeled data. Most current AI systems rely on supervised learning, where algorithms are trained on large labeled datasets. However, Hinton posits that unsupervised learning is key for AI to better mimic human learning. He is developing new algorithms for unsupervised learning, aimed at creating AI systems that can learn from the environment like a child.
In a clip shared with students from VinUniversity shortly after the VinFuture award ceremony on December 7, Professor Geoffrey Hinton stated that halting development is not an option to ensure safety as AI becomes more intelligent than humans.
“I am concerned, but I do not believe that an ‘apocalypse’ is unavoidable. However, we cannot overlook the possibilities and must work diligently to prevent it. I hope that the most talented students will choose to research AI safety, seeking ways to make it safer and address diverse threats, from the long-term threat of AI taking control to short-term threats like cybercrime.
He advised students: “The best way to conduct excellent research is to pursue what you are truly passionate about. Curiosity is the driving force behind great research. In particular, you should seek out areas where people seem to be pursuing a common approach and you feel they are doing it wrong. You just need a hunch that something is amiss with the way they are doing it, and you need to explore that. Many times your intuition may be wrong, but sometimes it’s right, and if you persist, you will uncover what they are doing wrong and how to do it right. That’s how excellent research comes about. If you can do that, you can conduct some truly remarkable research.”.
