Geoffrey Hinton

British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist who is the 'godfather of deep learning' — developing backpropagation, deep belief networks, capsule networks, and other foundational techniques that enabled modern AI.

Backpropagation (1986, with Rumelhart and Williams): the training algorithm that makes deep neural networks learnable. Deep belief networks (2006): demonstrated that deep networks could be trained efficiently using unsupervised pre-training. AlexNet (2012, with Krizhevsky and Sutskever): won ImageNet by a wide margin, demonstrating that deep convolutional networks were far superior for visual recognition. Nobel Prize in Physics 2024.