University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton is perhaps the leading visible head of Google’s artificial intelligence research.
Geoffrey Hinton was born in Wimbledon, a southwestern suburb of London whose name resonates thanks to the Tennis Grand Slam held there annually. Hinton’s education seems to be that of a British with aspirations and ability. In 1970 he graduated in experimental psychology King’s College, Cambridge. Years later he obtained his PhD in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh.
Geoffrey Hinton’s career is that of an academic. After his doctorate he went to the University of Sussex, the University of California, the University of San Diego and Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. This collection of universities shows clearly his eagerness for research. It also indicates that the teacher is comfortable in this environment.
Throughout his long career, this 69-year-old Briton has been part of organizations, and has even founded one, with a view to promoting research in computational neuroscience. But it was in 2012 when his path ran into Google. In 2012 the company realized the potential of Hinton’s jobs. In six months, the teacher and two of his students were already on the payroll of the multinational.
Geoffrey Hinton, in the center, along with other first swords in artificial intelligence
Hinton is part of the Google Brain Team , which enjoys great freedom for its projects. This group is basically dedicated to research and chooses its objectives with total freedom, according to the company. The truth is that otherwise it would be impossible to attract academics like the British professor.
And is that lately software companies have turned to university professors, eminences of the academic world in artificial intelligence, to boost your research in this area. Hinton is a good example of this. He has recently published two papers shaping ideas that he has macerated for four decades.
Academics earn resources for their research and in return, companies benefit from these jobs. Although these are published, companies are pioneers in knowing the results and being able to take advantage of them.
In artificial intelligence, Google has bet hard. Your autonomous car project or DeepMind they fall into this category. But also other fields, such as your simultaneous translator or the platform TensorFlow.
Images: ColiN00B, Wikipedia
