Google Hires Geoffrey Hinton -The Artificial Intelligence Guru


Geoffrey Hinton,  a British-born computer scientist and psychologist and a professor at the University of Toronto, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks will now be leading Google’s attempts to conquer the space of Artificial Intelligence. The company has hired the man who showed how to make computers learn much like the human brain.

According to the reports, Hinton will be working part-time for the internet giant,, where he will be using deep learning techniques to improve voice recognition, image tagging, and countless other Google’s online tools. Hinton's research is focused on understanding how collections of brain cells called neural networks can learn by changing their interactions with one another.

"Really the payoff so far has been in trying to understand the brain, we've come up lots of ways in which these systems can learn," he said in an interview posted on Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council's website. “Over the last 20 to 30 years, he has been pushing forward the frontier of neural networks and deep learning,” says Kai Yu, the director of Baidu’s Institute of Deep Learning.

Geoffrey Hinton’s accomplishments include investigating ways of using neural networks for learning, memory, perception and symbol processing. His other contributions to neural network research include distributed representations, time-delay neural networks, mixtures of experts, Helmholtz machines and Product of Experts. Geoffrey Hinton’s was one of the researchers who introduced the back-propagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural networks that has been widely used for practical applications. His current main interest is in unsupervised learning procedures for neural networks with rich sensory input.