Vinfuture 2024 main prize winner receives 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics

Professor Geoffrey E. Hinton (Canada), the winner of the Vinfuture 2024 main prize, has just received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.

This is the fifth scientist to receive the Vinfuture Main Prize to be awarded the Nobel Prize. Previously, Professor Katalin Karikó and Professor Drew Weissman, the winners of the Vinfuture Main Prize 2021; Dr. Demis Hassabis (UK) and Dr. John Jumper (USA), the winners of the Vinfuture Main Prize 2022, were also awarded the Nobel Prize.

Professor Geoffrey E. Hinton (Canada), the winner of the Vinfuture 2024 main prize, has just received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. (Photo: AP)

This demonstrates the pioneering vision of the founders of the Vinfuture Prize - the first international science and technology prize initiated by Vietnamese people, affirming its mark in the international scientific community after only 4 years of operation.

Geoffrey Hinton is often referred to as the "godfather of deep learning" for his enormous contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The contributions of Professor Geoffrey E. Hinton and four scientists: Yoshua Bengio, Jen-Hsun Huang, Yann LeCun and Fei-Fei Li to promote the progress of deep learning were honored with the main prize, worth 3 million USD (more than 76 billion VND) of VinFuture 2024.

Geoffrey Hinton is often referred to as the "godfather of deep learning" for his enormous contributions to the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The award committee recognized him for his leadership and foundational work on neural network architecture. His 1986 paper with David Rumelhart and Ronald Williams demonstrated distributed representations in neural networks trained by the backpropagation algorithm. This method has become a standard tool in the field of artificial intelligence and has led to advances in image and speech recognition.

Born on 6 December 1947 in Wimbledon, London, Hinton is a descendant of logician George Boole, who laid the foundations of digital circuit design theory. He is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, widely recognized for his pioneering research in artificial intelligence (AI).

5 scientists received the Vinfuture 2024 Main Prize at the Award Ceremony on the evening of December 6 (name and photo of Professor Geoffrey E. Hinton is the second on the screen).

One of Hinton's most notable predictions is that AI will soon be able to understand and produce natural language at a level that is on par with humans. This prediction is based on the rapid advancement of machine learning and reinforcement learning algorithms.

Another area of ​​Hinton's research is unsupervised learning, a type of machine learning in which algorithms learn from unlabeled data. Most AI systems today rely on supervised learning, in which algorithms are trained on large sets of labeled data. However, Hinton believes that unsupervised learning is key to making AI more closely mimic the way humans learn. He is developing new algorithms for unsupervised learning, aiming to create AI systems that can learn from their environment like a child.

In a clip shared with VinUni students right after the VinFuture Awards ceremony on December 7, Professor Geoffrey Hinton said that stopping development is not an option to ensure safety when AI becomes smarter than humans.

'I am concerned but do not think the 'doomsday' is inevitable. However, we cannot ignore the possibilities and need to work hard to prevent it. Hopefully the most talented students will choose to study AI safety, find ways to make it safer and address a variety of threats, from long-term threats such as AI takeover to short-term threats such as cybercrime.

And he told students: "The best way to do great research is to pursue something that you are really interested in. Curiosity is the driving force for great research. In particular, you should look for areas where everyone seems to be following a common approach and you have a feeling that they are doing it wrong. You just need a hunch that there is something wrong with the way they are doing it and you need to explore that. Many times your hunch may be wrong but sometimes it is right and if you persist you will find out what they are doing wrong and how to do it right. That is how great research comes about. If you can do that, you can do great research . "