A former undergraduate student from Psychology, Geoffrey Hinton (King’s 1967), was this year awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics 2024 for his work on AI, neural networks and deep learning (jointly with John Hopfield of Princeton University). Geoff received his BA in Experimental Psychology from our department in 1970, before going on to do a PhD at the University of Edinburgh in artificial intelligence. He also then worked at the MRC APU for a while before moving to the US and then Canada. Hinton and Hopfield were awarded the prize ‘for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.’ Hinton, who is known as the ‘Godfather of AI’, is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Read more here.
Incredibly, this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was also jointly awarded to two Cambridge alumni. Sir Demis Hassabis (Queens’ 1994) and Dr John Jumper (St. Edmunds 2011) were recognised, alongside David Baker of the University of Washington, for developing ‘an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures.’ We were delighted to welcome Demis to our International Symposium, Artificial & Biological Cognition 2019, where he delivered the Alan Hodgkin Plenary Lecture. Read more here.
Posted on 15/10/2024
