'Godfather' of deep learning is reimagining AI

Geoffrey Hinton may be the "godfather" of deep learning, a suddenly hot field of artificial intelligence, or AI – but that doesn't mean he's resting on his algorithms. Hinton, a University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, recently released two new papers that promise to improve the way machines understand the world through images or video – a technology with applications ranging from self-driving cars to making medical diagnoses. "This is a much more robust way to detect objects than what we have at present," Hinton, who is also a fellow at Google's AI research arm, said today at a tech conference in Toronto. "If you've been in the field for a long time like I have, you know that the neural nets that we use now – there's nothing special about them. We just sort of made them up."