By: Alison Rutka
15 Oct, 2024
Three 2024 Nobel Laureates among CIFAR’s acclaimed community of researchers
October 15, 2024
CIFAR is celebrating the announcement of two new Nobel Laureates with affiliations to CIFAR’s history of exceptional research. Daron Acemoglu (MIT) and James Robinson (University of Chicago), who both served as Fellows in CIFAR’s Institutions, Organizations & Growth program, were most recently awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their ongoing work to understand the prosperity of nations. Current CIFAR Advisor in Learning in Machines & Brains, Geoffrey Hinton (University of Toronto) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his groundbreaking contributions to AI last week. With the addition of these three exceptional accomplishments, CIFAR’s community has included 23 Nobel Laureates throughout its more than four-decade history.
“Over more than 40 years, CIFAR has been proud to support high-risk, high-reward research at the cutting-edge of discovery,” says Stephen Toope, President and CEO of CIFAR. “This year’s Nobel announcements underscore the importance of championing long-term research with the potential to transform the world around us. Geoffrey Hinton, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson demonstrate that intellectual tenacity can lead to breakthroughs, and their accolades are well-deserved.”
Advancing the study of prosperity
Political economics has long been an area of examination for CIFAR. Twenty years ago, CIFAR formed its Institutions, Organizations & Growth program to shed light on how best to address some of the toughest issues facing the world today, from poverty and inequality to instability and violence. In their roles as Fellows of the program, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson joined an illustrious group of researchers in exploring why some nations prosper while others fail. Their work led to the field-defining publication, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty in 2012.
These ongoing efforts to highlight the structural systems contributing to prosperity are central to their naming as Nobel Laureates in Economics “for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.” The researchers share this accolade with Simon Johnson (MIT). The foundations laid by CIFAR’s Institutions, Organizations & Growth program continue to shape current work in the Innovation, Equity & the Future of Prosperity program, which examines the institutional systems that shape prosperity and address inequality.
Laying the foundations for today’s AI revolution
Long-time CIFAR Fellow Geoffrey Hinton has also joined the illustrious group of Nobel Laureates. Hinton was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with John Hopfield “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” Hinton first joined the CIFAR community in 1987, as a Fellow in CIFAR’s very first program, then known as Artificial Intelligence, Robotics & Society. In 2004, Hinton and collaborators including Yoshua Bengio and David Fleet, among others, successfully proposed the launch of a new program at CIFAR, Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception (or NCAP, which today is named Learning in Machines & Brains). Hinton remains an Advisor in Learning in Machines & Brains today. Hinton’s recognition follows decades of visionary research, with Canada benefitting from early support of Hinton’s work.
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