University Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton was recently named as one of four winners of the 2022 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical & Scientific Research.
The awards are presented annually in the Spanish city of Oviedo, capital of the principality of Asturias. They recognize the achievements of individuals, entities or organizations in the areas of sciences, humanities and public affairs.
Hinton shares the award with three other pioneers of the branch of artificial intelligence known as deep learning: Yoshua Bengio (University of Montreal), Yann LeCun (New York University/Facebook) and Demis Hassabis, co-founder of leading AI company DeepMind.
A jury statement from the Princess of Asturias Foundation said of the winners: “their contributions to the development of ‘deep learning’ have led to major advances in techniques as diverse as speech recognition, natural language processing, object perception, machine translation, strategy optimization, the analysis of protein structure, medical diagnosis and many others. Their current and future impact on the progress of society may be described as extraordinary.”
Hinton joined the Department of Computer Science in 1987. He has since won numerous awards for his groundbreaking research, including the 2018 Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel prize of computing.”
"The Princess of Asturias Award is a well-deserved recognition for Geoff Hinton, whose pioneering work in deep learning has enabled advances in a wide range of fields,” said Marsha Chechik, chair of the department. “Through this cutting-edge research, he has transformed the lives of billions of people around the world. We are immensely proud."