Former CMU faculty Geoffrey Hinton awarded 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics – News

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024(opens in new window) to John J. Hopfield of Princeton University and Geoffrey E. Hinton of the University of Toronto in recognition of their fundamental work in machine learning with artificial neural networks.

Inspired by the human brain, artificial neural networks are computer systems used to process and learn from data.

Hinton served in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University from 1982 to 1987. He received the Carnegie Mellon's 2021 Dickson Prize in Science(opens in new window).

“The Nobel Prize is one of the most significant and highly valued public recognitions for researchers today,” CMU President said Farnam Jahanian(opens in new window). “Our extended Carnegie Mellon University community is extremely proud that Geoffrey Hinton’s talents and groundbreaking research are being recognized in such a meaningful way and grateful for his many scholarly contributions to computer science, AI and society.”

At CMU, he co-authored an influential paper on the backpropagation algorithm, which allows neural networks to discover their own internal representations of data. He showed that the algorithm allowed neural networks to solve problems that were thought to be beyond their reach.

The award announcement also mentions work that Hinton carried out on Boltzmann machines with Terrence Sejnowksi, then at Johns Hopkins University. Later, Hinton and his students at the University of Toronto made improvements to convolutional neural networks that halved error rates in object recognition, reshaping the field of computer vision.

“The work of the award winners has already been of great benefit. In physics, we use artificial neural networks in a variety of areas, such as developing new materials with specific properties,” said Ellen Moons, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics.

At the University of Toronto, Hinton consulted Ruslan Salakhutdinov(opens in new window) while completing his Ph.D. pursued. from 2005-09. Salakhutdinov, now a UPMC professor of computer science in CMU's Machine Learning Department (MLD), cited Hinton as his most important influence.

“Without Geoff and his leadership, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” Salakhutdinov said. “Geoff basically discovered this unique algorithm that can efficiently train these deep networks. This laid the foundation for many deep learning models and architectures and inspired many people to get involved with it – all driven by Geoff.”

Salakhutdinov continues to work on generative models at Carnegie Mellon, including large language models, AI agents, deep learning, and decision making. He said Hinton thinks fondly of CMU.

“When he was at CMU, it was great. “He went to CMU and saw all these students and researchers working hard in the labs and believed that they were creating the future, and that unique environment was something he loved,” Salakhutdinov said.

As Director of MLD at CMU Zico Kolter leads the Faculty of Computer Science through the research revolution triggered by generative artificial intelligence tools. His own research focuses on machine learning, optimization and control, with much of his work focused on making deep learning algorithms more secure, robust and modular. Kolter has previously shown how it is possible to circumvent large language models.

“The field that Geoff helped create – deep learning – has become one of the biggest things in our society,” Kolter said. “Almost all modern AI systems are based on deep learning. Geoff was the cornerstone of deep learning.”

Hinton was born in London in 1947 and received his Ph.D. 1978 from the University of Edinburgh.
Winner of the ACM Turing Award (along with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun for their revolutionary work on deep neural networks), Hinton is the second person ever to win both a Turing Award and a Nobel Prize – the first being another Carnegie Mellon professor . Herb Simon(opens in new window).

The Nobel Prize is worth 11 million Swedish crowns, or $1 million, to be divided among the winners.