Royal Society

The University of Toronto’s Geoffrey Hinton has been honoured with the Royal Society’s prestigious Royal Medal for his pioneering work in deep learning – a field of artificial intelligence that mimics the way humans acquire certain types of knowledge.

The U.K.’s national academy of sciences said it is recognizing Hinton, a University Professor Emeritus in the department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science, for “pioneering work on algorithms that learn distributed representations in artificial neural networks and their application to speech and vision, leading to a transformation of the international information technology industry.”

It’s the latest in a long list of accolades for Hinton, who is also chief scientific adviser at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and a vice-president and engineering fellow at Google. Others include the Association for Computing Machinery’s A. M. Turing Award, widely considered the Nobel Prize of computing.

“It is a great honour to receive the Royal Medal – a medal previously awarded to intellectual giants like Darwin, Faraday, Boole and G.I. Taylor,” Hinton says.

“But unlike them, my success was the result of recruiting and nurturing an extraordinarily talented set of graduate students and post-docs who were responsible for many of the breakthroughs in deep learning that revolutionized artificial intelligence over the last 15 years.”

Royal Medals have been awarded annually since 1826 for advancements in the physical and biological sciences. A third medal – for applied sciences – has been awarded since 1965.

Previous ��˾��ֱ�� winners of the Royal Medal include Anthony Pawson and Nobel Prize-winner John Polanyi.

Hinton, meanwhile, has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1998 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1996.

“The Royal Medal is one of the most significant acknowledgements of an individual’s research and career,” says Melanie Woodin, dean of the Faculty of Arts & Science. “And Professor Hinton is truly deserving of the distinction – for his foundational research and for the exceptional contribution he’s made toward shaping the modern world and the future. I am thrilled to congratulate him on this award.”

“I want to congratulate Geoff on this spectacular achievement,” adds Eyal de Lara, chair of the department of computer science. “We are very proud of the seminal contributions he has made to the field of computer science, which are fundamentally reshaping our discipline and impacting society at large.”

Deep learning is a type of machine learning that relies on a neural network modelled on the network of neurons in the human brain. In 1986, Hinton and his collaborators developed the breakthrough approach – based on the backpropagation algorithm, a central mechanism by which artificial neural networks learn – that would realize the promise of neural networks and form the current foundation of that technology.

Hinton and his colleagues in Toronto built on that initial work with a number of critical developments that enhanced the potential of AI and helped usher in today’s revolution in deep learning with applications in speech and image recognition, self-driving vehicles, automated diagnosis of images and language, and more.

“I believe that the spectacular recent progress in large language models, image generation and protein structure prediction is evidence that the deep learning revolution has only just started,” Hinton says.

Three ��˾��ֱ�� researchers named fellows of U.K.'s Royal Society

perry.king — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 04:00:00 +0000

Three ��˾��ֱ�� researchers named fellows of U.K.'s Royal Society

perry.king Wed, 04/17/2019 - 00:00

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University of Toronto researchers Barbara Sherwood Lollar, Benjamin Blencowe and Molly Shoichet have been named fellows of the Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences (photo by Perry King, Nick Iwanyshyn and Neil Ta)

Perry King

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Royal Society

Three prominent University of Toronto researchers are among 50 scientists who have been named fellows of the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s national academy of sciences.

Earth scientist Barbara Sherwood Lollar, molecular geneticist Benjamin Blencowe and biomedical engineer Molly Shoichet will join the centuries-old institution – composed of eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the U.K. and the Commonwealth.

Admitting up to 52 fellows and 10 foreign members out of about 700 candidates each year, the fellowship recognizes scientists who have made substantial contributions to their fields.

University Professors Sherwood Lollar and Shoichet are two of 13 women scientists admitted this year. All three ��˾��ֱ�� researchers are also fellows of the Royal Society of Canada.

“The fact that the Royal Society recognized outstanding researchers in three separate disciplines demonstrates the range of talent, creativity and leadership that ��˾��ֱ�� fosters and grows,” said Vivek Goel, ��˾��ֱ��’s vice-president of research and innovation. “Election to the Royal Society is an important international recognition of their exceptional work. ��˾��ֱ�� congratulates them on this incredible achievement.”

New fellows are considered and selected by Royal Society members from any sector of the scientific community. For Sherwood Lollar, whose work ranges from geology and geochemistry to Earth sciences and, most recently, astrobiology, being recognized by her peers is “the ultimate big picture.”

“It’s an acknowledgement that I find utterly humbling,” said Sherwood Lollar of ��˾��ֱ��’s department of Earth sciences in Faculty of Arts & Science. “When I received that letter, I read it, I read it again, and I read a third time to make sure I understood.

“My colleague said it’s sort of the equivalent of getting the letter from Hogwarts,” she added, with laughter.

Sherwood Lollar is known for discoveries on the habitability of deep Earth fracture waters – which are driving insights into deep space mission planning – and has transformed how we understand the age and extent of Earth's groundwater through the discovery of billion-year-old waters.

She was also the chair of a committee of scientists who recently published An Astrobiology Science Strategy for the Search for Life in the Universe, a report commissioned by NASA that recommends an approach to finding life beyond Earth.

Blencowe, a professor in the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research and the department of molecular genetics, is a pioneer in the development and application of high-throughput RNA profiling technologies. He recently led the discovery of a gene regulatory network linked to autism – work that could lead to new therapies.

Speaking about the Royal Society appointment prior to the announcement, Blencowe praised past and present departmental chairs for giving him the opportunity to do his research and for fostering a “collaborative spirit” with researchers of varying backgrounds.

“A wonderful thing about Toronto is this collaborative environment where researchers work really well together and come up with amazing discoveries,” said Blencowe, a winner of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada’s Polanyi Award in 2011.

“It’s a tremendous honour that could not have happened without the contributions of a remarkably talented team of researchers that I have the pleasure of working with every day.”

Shoichet, a world-leading expert on regenerative medicine and tissue engineering, is Ontario's former chief scientist and has published more than 500 papers, patents and abstracts, and given more than 350 lectures worldwide in regenerative medicine, tissue engineering and drug delivery. Her latest projects include AmacaThera, a ��˾��ֱ��-based health startup that is developing alternatives to post-surgical painkillers – a key source of the current opioid crisis.

Shoichet is honoured to join this list of scholars “whose work has shaped and changed our understanding of our world, and what is possible.”

“I am thrilled to be named among more than 180 women engineers, scientists and researchers who blazed this trail before me,” said Shoichet, who holds appointments in the department of chemical engineering and applied chemistry, the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering and the Donnelly Centre.

Shoichet, an Officer of the Order of Canada, is the only person to be elected a fellow of all three of Canada’s national academies and is a foreign member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

“It’s wonderful to be sharing this recognition with two other brilliant scientists at the University of Toronto, Barbara Sherwood Lollar and Benjamin Blencowe,” she added.

The new fellows will be formally admitted to the society at their Admissions Day ceremony in July.

With files from Carolyn Farrell

Convocation 2015: meet honorary grad Sir Paul Nurse

sgupta — Mon, 09 Nov 2015 09:23:30 +0000

Convocation 2015: meet honorary grad Sir Paul Nurse sgupta Mon, 11/09/2015 - 04:23

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(photo courtesy Sir Paul Nurse)

Sir Paul Nurse is a globally renowned geneticist and cell biologist whose discoveries have helped to explain how the cell controls its cycle of growth and division.

On Nov.9, the University of Toronto recognized Nurse's extraordinary accomplishments with a Doctor of Science, honoris causa.

Using the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe as a model system, his laboratory studies the cell cycle and cell morphogenesis controls operative in eukaryotic cells. His major past contribution was the codiscovery of cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) as the key regulator molecules controlling S phase and mitosis, findings that have had implications for understanding cell reproduction, cell growth, development and cancer.

Nurse's contributions to cell biology and cancer research were recognised with a knighthood in 1999 and he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2001. He has received the Royal and Copley medals of the Royal Society, the Albert Lasker Award and the Legion d'honneur.

Over the last 30 years, Nurse has held many senior research leadership roles. He became director of research at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) in London in 1993 and director general in 1996. In 2002 he was appointed chief executive of Cancer Research UK, formed from the merger of ICRF with the Cancer Research Campaign. Between 2003 and 2011 he served as the President of Rockefeller University until his appointment as Director and Chief Executive of the Francis Crick Institute, London. In 2010, he was elected as President of the Royal Society for a five-year term.

Watch a video of Sir Paul Nurse below:

Harvard Science & Democracy Lecture from HUCE on Vimeo.

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