A British-Canadian researcher has gained the Nobel Prize in physics for work creating the foundations of machine studying and synthetic intelligence.
The College of Toronto’s Geoffrey Hinton was awarded the prize Tuesday morning, together with Princeton College researcher John Hopfield.
“I’m flabbergasted. I had, no thought this may occur,” Hinton stated when reached by the Nobel committee on the telephone Tuesday.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences says the prize was awarded to Hinton and Hopfield for “foundational discoveries and innovations that allow machine studying with synthetic neural networks.”
Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee on the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, says the 2 laureates “used basic ideas from statistical physics to design synthetic neural networks that operate as associative reminiscences and discover patterns in giant information units.”
She says that such networks have been used to advance analysis in physics and “have additionally develop into a part of our every day lives, as an illustration in facial recognition and language translation.”
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Whereas the committee honoured the science behind machine studying and synthetic intelligence, Moons additionally talked about its flip aspect, saying that “whereas machine studying has monumental advantages, its fast growth has additionally raised issues about our future.”
“Collectively, people carry the accountability for utilizing this new know-how in a secure and moral method for the best advantage of humankind.”
Hinton shares these issues. He give up a job at Google so he may extra freely converse in regards to the risks of the know-how he helped create.
Hinton stated he continues to fret “about quite a lot of attainable dangerous penalties” of his machine studying work, “significantly the specter of this stuff getting uncontrolled,” however nonetheless would do it yet again.
The physics prize carries a money award from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.
— with information from The Related Press.
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