Five recognized with honorary degrees Harvard Gazette

Harvard’s 375th Commencement will confer five honorary degrees during Thursday’s ceremony. Geoffrey Hinton is set to receive a Doctor of Science. He earned a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence decades before personal computers and long before the internet became common for everyday communication. His work helped bring AI to prominence, and he later shifted toward warning about deliberate misuse, technology-driven unemployment, and existential risk from overdependence on artificial intelligence rather than human judgment. He studied experimental psychology at King’s College, Cambridge, earned his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh, led a neuroscience unit at University College London, did postdoctoral work at UC San Diego, taught at Carnegie-Mellon, and joined the University of Toronto in 1987. He is known for neural networks that learn without human teaching and for co-inventing the Boltzmann machine.

"Geoffrey Hinton has now become its prognosticator, speaking out about the dangers of deliberate misuse, technology-driven unemployment, and the existential risk of overdependence on artificial intelligence, rather than human brains. And despite many honors, including a Turning Award and a Nobel Prize in physics, he has said that a part of him regrets his life's work."

"Hinton was educated at King's College, Cambridge, graduating with a B.A. in experimental psychology. He earned his Ph.D. in AI at the University of Edinburgh, was the first director of University College London's Gatsby Charitable Neuroscience Unit, did postdoctoral work at the University of California San Diego, and spent five years on the Computer Science faculty at Carnegie-Mellon University."

"According to the Royal Society of London, where he was a fellow, Hinton is distinguished for his work on artificial neural nets, especially how they can be designed to learn without the aid of a human teacher. This may well be the start of autonomous intelligent brain-like machines. His other expertise lies in deep learning algorithms, and he is noted for co-inventing the Boltzmann machine, a system that pretrains backpropatation methods."

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