The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their pioneering work in the field of machine learning. Their innovations have fundamentally shaped the development of modern artificial intelligence, particularly in the areas of image recognition and data pattern analysis.

Illustrations: Niklas Elmehed (Source: nobelprize.org)

John Hopfield developed an associative memory capable of storing and recalling images and other data patterns. Geoffrey Hinton's work is linked to neural networks, and he devised a method that enables systems to independently recognize and categorize features within data, such as identifying elements in images.

This field of research is particularly significant for our Faculty, as our Founding Dean, Professor Tamás Roska, also played a pioneering role in neural network research. His development of the cellular wave computer is considered a precursor to today’s convolutional networks. This technology is closely related to both the networks studied by Hinton and the associative memory developed by Hopfield, which was also mentioned in the book ”Cellular Neural Networks and Visual Computing: Foundations and Applications” published by Tamás Roska and Leon Chua 22 years ago.

The network architectures and algorithms developed by the Nobel laureates continue to play a central role in the research conducted by the Faculty of Information Technology and Bionics. Over the past decades, many of our researchers have built upon their results, and these innovations have also been successfully applied in everyday AI systems. We congratulate John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton on their outstanding work, which has partially laid the foundation for the direction in which our Faculty’s AI research is progressing.

Illustrations: Niklas Elmehed (Source: nobelprize.org)