All right, let's get started. Hi everyone, and welcome to the winter 2026 George and Maureen Euan lecture series. I am Nicola Aurora. I am the education and outreach officer for the Arthur B. McDonald Canadian Astroparticle Physics Research Institute, or lovingly known as the McDonald Institute. We are a community of scientists, universities, and research labs across Canada uncovering some of the biggest mysteries in the universe by looking at some of the tiniest things in the universe. Thank you all for coming tonight. I think we have a very topical lecture today, and I hope it inspires lots of learnings and some great discussion here.
As I begin, I want to recognize that we are on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee nations and the many indigenous people before them. I appreciate the opportunity and the privilege I have had to live out my dream as an astrophysicist to learn about this amazing universe from these lands. To all of you, I encourage you to reflect on your connections with these lands and the skies above us. I encourage you to explore resources like Whose Land and Native Sky Watchers to learn more about the past, the present, and the future stewards of these lands and their stories.
Okay, before we kick things off, we have a few housekeeping rules to keep in mind. At this point, I would ask you to please turn your ringers off or put your phone on silent mode. This will be a lecture of about 50 minutes. At the end of this lecture, there will be a question and answer session. I want to ensure a constructive and a lively discussion during that Q&A period. And I want to give as many people the chance to ask Professor Hinton their questions. So I ask you to limit your questions to one per person. There will be no follow-ups, but please also be concise while asking your questions.
We are also observing somewhat of a COVID-like protocol. So at the end of the lecture, we ask you to sort of respect the physical space of Professor Hinton and the speakers involved in this event. Okay. Now, as I said, this is the Euan lecture series where we will hear from Professor Geoffrey Hinton about how we can coexist with a super intelligent AI. I would first like to welcome to the podium Dr. Tony Noble, a professor at the Department of Physics, Engineering Physics, and Astronomy here at Queen's University and also the scientific director of the Arthur B. McDonald Canadian Astroparticle Physics Research Institute to say a few words about George and Maureen Euan and this lecture series in their name. Please welcome Professor Tony Noble.
It's really nice to see such a large and full crowd here. So I wanted to say a few words about the lectureship named in honor of George Euan. George was a professor of physics here at Queen's for many years and he's an internationally renowned figure in nuclear physics and in particle physics. He was one of the founding members and the Canadian spokesperson, the first Canadian spokesperson for what was called the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory or SNO. And that was an experiment which was located 2 kilometers underground in Sudbury which solved what was called the solar neutrino problem and which led to the Nobel Prize in 2015 for our own Professor Art McDonald. And as I look down the row and out into the crowd, I see many of the faculty who were involved in delivering that program.
So through his insights, he decided to endow some funds that would support a lectureship series. He was very keen on engagement with students. And so as you'll see, that was part of what he put in place. He was also a pioneer technically. He invented what was called lithium-drifted germanium detectors, which sounds like a mouthful but basically a photosensor that was critical to advanced science in nuclear and particle physics but was also extremely important in medical imaging and that sort of thing. So we hold this lecture roughly twice per year. Of course, we had some hits during COVID. And it's really meant to serve as a bridge between bringing the public in to hear from some of the world-leading experts on various topics related to what we do at the McDonald Institute. But to do so in a way that the public can really engage and understand, so it's not a highbrow scientific lecture. This was George's vision to bring in world-leading experts, connect with the public, connect with the students, and generally speaking, the guests come in and they spend a few days here and have an opportunity to meet lots of people while they're here and develop that community a little bit.
So, to introduce our speaker tonight, I thought it would actually be more appropriate if I just let AI tell me what the bio should be. And we'll see how that works out. So, when I asked AI to write me a short, punchy bio for Professor Hinton, this is what it came up with. And you can see if you think it's short and punchy, but Geoffrey Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive psychologist whose pioneering research has basically defined the modern age of artificial intelligence. Often known worldwide, and I don't know if this is a title you like or not, as the godfather of AI, currently a professor of physics emeritus at the University of Toronto as you see here, and also the chief scientific adviser at the Vector Institute. If you don't know the Vector Institute, again, it's a not-for-profit, independent institution dedicated towards artificial intelligence research.
So over many decades, Professor Hinton championed the development of artificial intelligence using neural networks even though much of the community at that time was focused on other aspects of artificial intelligence. They achieved a historic breakthrough in 2012 which proved that deep neural networks could vastly outperform traditional methods in things like image recognition. He's one of very few people on the planet who holds two of the highest honors: the Nobel Prize in physics and also the Turing Prize in computing, where it's often called the Nobel Prize in computing.
He was, for a decade, he was actually the vice president and an engineering fellow at Google and then in 2023 he resigned from Google on very good terms I understand, but it gave him an opportunity to speak freely about some of the things he was concerned about in terms of existential risks, how to incorporate AI safely, how to prioritize responsible development, and these sorts of things. So his work not only revolutionized how machines perceive the world but also changed our understanding in terms of the relationship between artificial intelligence and biological intelligence.
So that's what AI told me. They missed a few things. The rap sheet is incredibly long. So I wasn't going to go through that. They didn't talk about the fact that he got his bachelor's of arts in psychology from Cambridge, a PhD from Edinburgh in artificial intelligence. Didn't tell me that he just reached a new milestone which is 1 million citations on Google. So a citation is when somebody takes the effort to read your paper. So that's, you know, I'm at about seven or something like that. And there's one other thing just because it was a touching thing that I read. I actually heard an interview on CBC and in that interview, when he was being interviewed, it was mentioned that he had given up half of his award to support water treatment in indigenous communities in the north.
And it was particularly poignant and I added it just in the side notes today because coincidentally, Henry Giroux, who's not here because he's sick, six years old and he's in bed, came up with the idea, I don't know if you know, but the Kashechewan people who have been evacuated, many of them are here in Kingston living in hotels and all the kids and children are bored to death and he said to his father who's part of MIW, why don't you bring them over to the McDonald Institute and show them your visitor center and stuff. And I just thought, oh, that's just such a nice connection, you know, trying to improve the lives of our indigenous populations who are struggling because of things that they shouldn't have to struggle about with water security and so on. So, without any more, I'm sure we're going to hear a lot about artificial intelligence and also the human implications of its application. Professor Geoffrey Hinton, and I welcome you to the stage. Thank you.
