Geoffrey Hinton received his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh in 1978.  He did postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Diego and spent five years as a faculty member in the Computer Science department at Carnegie-Mellon University. He then moved to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto where he is now a Professor Emeritus. From 2013 to 2023, he worked half-time for Google where he became a Vice President and Engineering Fellow.

He was one of the researchers who introduced the backpropagation algorithm and the first to use backpropagation for learning word embeddings. His other contributions to neural network research include Boltzmann machines, distributed representations, time-delay neural nets, mixtures of experts, variational learning and deep learning.  His research group in Toronto made major breakthroughs in deep learning that revolutionized speech recognition and object classification.

Geoffrey Hinton is a fellow of the UK Royal Society and a foreign member of the US National Academy of Engineering and the US National Academy of Science. His awards include the David E. Rumelhart prize, the IJCAI award for research excellence, the Killam prize for Engineering,  the NSERC Herzberg Gold Medal, the IEEE James Clerk Maxwell Gold medal, the NEC C&C award, the BBVA award, the Honda Prize, the ACM Turing Award,  the Princess of Asturias Award, the VinFuture Grand Prize, the Queen Elizabeth Prize in Engineering and the Nobel Prize in Physics.