Distinguished Edinburgh graduate receives ACM A.M. Turing Award

[2019] Professor Geoffrey Hinton who graduated from Edinburgh University is one of the three recipients of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, along with Professors Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun. The award is for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.

Hinton received his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh in 1978 and was also awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Science in 2001 from Edinburgh. His first degree is in Experimental Psychology. He’s a fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Canada, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He was awarded the first David E. Rumelhart prize (2001), the IJCAI award for research excellence (2005), the Killam prize for Engineering (2012), and the IEEE James Clerk Maxwell Gold medal (2016).

He worked at Sussex University, University College London, the University of California San Diego, Carnegie-Mellon University, and the University of Toronto, where he is now an emeritus distinguished professor. He’s a VP and Engineering Fellow of Google.

Fathers of the Deep Learning Revolution

Working independently and together, Hinton, LeCun and Bengio developed conceptual foundations for the field, identified surprising phenomena through experiments, and contributed engineering advances that demonstrated the practical advantages of deep neural networks. In recent years, deep learning methods have been responsible for astonishing breakthroughs in computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and robotics—among other applications.

Nobel Prize of Computing

The ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing", carries a $1 million prize, with financial support provided by Google, Inc. It is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing. ACM will present the 2018 A.M. Turing Award at its annual Awards Banquet on June 15 in San Francisco, California