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As artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton walked across a stage in Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize in physics, his country’s pride was palpable.

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A large crowd of about 100 students and colleagues from the University of Toronto, where Hinton is professor emeritus, gathered on the downtown campus Tuesday to see the British-Canadian computer scientist and his co-laureate, John Hopfield, receive their prize.

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Both men received the honor because their use of physics developed some of the foundations of machine learning, a branch of computer science that helps AI mimic the way humans learn.

When Hinton, dressed in a dark suit and white bow tie, approached King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden to collect his diploma and gold medal, applause rang out in the campus lobby of Schwartz Reisman school innovation. There were even a few tears.

“There is, at least for me, the feeling that Professor Hinton created the whole ecosystem here, where thousands of people are working on his ideas,” said Michael Guerzhoy, one of Hinton’s former students who then taught in a course that Hinton had once led at the university.

The idea that won Hinton the Nobel dates back to the 1980s, when he was working at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and AI was far from the hot technology it is today.

That’s when Hinton developed the Boltzmann machine, which learns from examples rather than instructions and, once trained, can recognize familiar features in information, even if it has never seen that data before .

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This work was so crucial to the world of AI that Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel physics committee, said Hinton was now considered “a leading figure in the development of effective learning algorithms.”

“He pioneered efforts to establish deep and dense neural networks. Such networks are effective at sorting and interpreting large amounts of data and improve based on the accuracy of the result,” Moons said when presenting Hinton to the king to receive his award.

“Today, artificial neural networks are powerful tools in research fields spanning physics, chemistry and medicine, as well as in everyday life. »

The Nobel Prize won by Hinton is endowed with 11 million Swedish crowns, or approximately 1.4 million Canadian dollars, from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.

Hinton and Hopfield will split the money, with a portion of Hinton’s share going to Water First, an Ontario organization that works to improve Indigenous access to water, and another anonymous charity supporting youth neurodiverse adults.

Hinton, now 77 after celebrating his birthday last week, said he has no plans to do more “exploratory research.”

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He remains involved in the University of Toronto community and serves as chief scientific advisor to the Vector Institute, an AI research center based in Toronto.

“I think I’m going to spend my time advocating for people to work on security,” he said in October.

Last year, Hinton left his job at Google to speak more freely about the dangers of AI, which he says include bias and discrimination, fake news, unemployment, deadly autonomous weapons and even the end of humanity.

At a press conference in Stockholm this weekend, he said he did not regret the work he had done that laid the foundations for artificial intelligence, but that he wished he had thought about safety sooner.

“Under the same circumstances, I would do the same thing,” he said.

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