The man who helped turn Toronto into a high-tech hotbed

Toronto

AS an undergraduate at Cambridge University, Geoffrey Everest Hinton thought a lot about the brain. He wanted to better understand how it worked but was frustrated that no field of study offered real answers.

So he set about building his own computer models to mimic the brain's process. "People just thought I was crazy," said Mr Hinton, now 69, a Google fellow who is also a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Toronto.