University of Toronto’s Geoffrey Hinton wins Nobel Prize in physics

A British-Canadian researcher has won the Nobel Prize in physics.

Geoffrey Hinton from the University of Toronto (U of T) and Princeton University researcher John Hopfield were awarded the prize this morning.

The Royal Academy of Swedish Sciences says the prize was awarded to Hinton and Hopfield for “foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.”

Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, says the two laureates “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets.”

She says such networks have been used to advance research in physics and “have also become part of our daily lives, for instance, in facial recognition and language translation.”

The physics prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.

Six days of Nobel announcements opened Monday with Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun winning the medicine prize.