Geoffrey Hinton to donate some of Nobel winnings to create new annual award

The chairs of an annual science and technology conference say Nobel Prize recipient Geoffrey Hinton is donating some of his winnings to create a new award.

They say of the Neural Information Processing Systems conference say the US$10,000 award will be handed out at the event each year.

It will be given to teams of two or more researchers under the age of 40 who write a paper proposing a novel theory of how the brain works.

The award will be named the Sejnowski-Hinton Prize after computational neurobiologist Terry Sejnowski and AI pioneer Hinton.

Hinton received the Nobel for physics along with computer scientist John Hopfield earlier this week in Stockholm.

Hinton has said he will also donate a portion of the 11 million Swedish kronor — about $1.4 million Canadian dollars — prize money he and Hopfield will split to Water First, an organization working to boost Indigenous access to water.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 13, 2024.

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press