The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies category goes, in this ninth edition, to artificial intelligence researcher Geoffrey Hinton, “for his pioneering and highly influential work” to endow machines with the ability to learn.
The new laureate, the jury continues, “is inspired by how the human brain works and how this knowledge can be applied to provide machines with human-like capabilities in performing complex tasks.”
Hinton is professor of computer science at the University of Toronto and, since 2013, a Distinguished Researcher at Google, where he was hired after the speech and voice recognition programs developed by him and his team proved far superior to those then in use. His research has since speeded the progress of AI applications, many of them now making their appearance on the market: from machine translation and photo classification programs to speech recognition systems and personal assistants like Siri, by way of such headline developments as self-driving cars.
Biomedical research is another area to benefit – for instance, through the analysis of medical images to diagnose whether a tumor will metastasize, or the search for molecules of utility in new drug discovery – along with any research field that demands the identifying and extracting of key information from massive data sets.
From BBVA Foundation
View Full Article
No entries found