U of T establishes new Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence thanks to generous support from Google

Geoffrey Hinton at U of T’s St. George campus. Photo by Nick Iwanyshyn.

The University of Toronto is proud to announce that it has established the Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence, made possible by $10 million in funding from Google.

This new chair will honour the extraordinary legacy of University Professor Emeritus and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton at U of T and Google by enabling the university to recruit and retain another brilliant, internationally recognized AI expert to make profound contributions to the field.

“On behalf of the university, I would like to express our deepest gratitude to Google for this wonderful investment,” said Melanie A. Woodin, University of Toronto president. “This new chair will enable us to build on Geoff Hinton’s historic contributions in artificial intelligence and to advance our record of transformational research in fields of crucial importance to the world.”

U of T is matching Google’s support with an additional $10 million in funding. This historic $20-million investment makes the Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence one of the University of Toronto’s most prestigious and generously supported advanced research roles, with substantial endowed support for a leading-edge AI researcher and additional funds to drive fundamental discoveries and insights — creating the intellectual underpinnings necessary to take AI to the next level.

“Google is proud to partner with the University of Toronto in establishing this endowed chair, recognizing the extraordinary impact of Geoff Hinton, whose Nobel Prize-winning work laid the foundation for modern artificial intelligence,” said Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research. “On a personal level, it was a delight to have Geoff as a colleague for more than a decade. This chair will empower world-class academic scholars to accelerate breakthrough innovations and drive responsible research that shapes a future where AI serves a common good.”

The Hinton Chair is the first in the university’s newly developed Third-Century Chairs program, a strategic effort established on the cusp of U of T’s bicentennial to attract and retain visionary scholars who can transform disciplines, shape global discussions, improve lives and strengthen Canada’s capacity to prosper. With competition for talent at an all-time high, the program will help the university amass critical expertise in areas essential to the country’s future — a key priority shared by the Canadian government, which recently announced a $1.7-billion commitment to attract top global research talent.

The Hinton Chair will also help U of T recruit, teach and train some of the world’s most talented students in the field, fuelling innovation in AI applications across medicine, engineering, discovery science, the humanities and more, expanding the university’s AI networks and international partnerships and sparking a new wave of promising AI startups.

Building on Hinton’s revolutionary research

The Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence aims to support the same brilliant, exploratory research that its namesake has pursued during his time at the University of Toronto and at Google.

After receiving his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978 and completing several years of postdoctoral work in the United Kingdom and the United States, Geoffrey Hinton came to the University of Toronto in 1987 as a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). There, along with several graduate students, he accelerated his expansive work on artificial neural networks as a potential pathway for advancing AI, developing core concepts such as: backpropagation algorithms; distributed representations; time-delay neural nets; mixtures of experts, variational learning and deep learning; and, most famously, Boltzmann machines.

In the 2000s, Hinton’s ideas began to yield extremely promising results. In March 2013, as more tech companies recognized the promise of artificial neural networks, Hinton joined Google as a vice president and engineering fellow, where he would stay for the next decade, splitting his time between the company and U of T.

Although many people have contributed to the current state of AI, arguably none was more important than Hinton, whose decades-long research forms the foundation of modern artificial intelligence and its myriad applications across nearly every discipline and sector. He is also responsible for the “Hinton effect,” which saw many of his students go on to lead AI advances in universities and companies across the globe.

“I am grateful for having been able to pursue my research at the University of Toronto, which afforded me the time and resources to develop the ideas that would eventually grow into the success of neural nets,” said Geoffrey Hinton. “I am encouraged that the Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence will support the next generation of AI research in the same vein, allowing ideas of great promise to germinate for the benefit of all humanity.”

Together with John J. Hopfield, Hinton won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024 for his foundational work in enabling deep learning and propelling the field to its current peak.

University of Toronto — a world leader in AI

Based at the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Department of Computer Science — ranked 12th in the world according to the 2025 QS World University Rankings by Subject and a global leader in deep learning and generative AI — the Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence will leverage U of T’s and Toronto’s substantial and widely recognized strengths in AI.

“It’s thrilling to consider the astonishing possibilities of welcoming a globally leading AI researcher into this setting,” said Interim Dean, Faculty of Arts & Science Stephen Wright. “At the Department of Computer Science, the chair-holder will be surrounded by a remarkable concentration of scientific knowledge and creative skills, and a deep, proven track record of research excellence. It’s an ideal platform for charting new pathways and pursuing breakthrough discoveries in our shared goal of a brighter technological future for all.”

The University of Toronto is home to CIFAR AI Chairs and Canada Research Chairs in AI and has spurred several cutting-edge AI startups such as BlueDot (infectious disease intelligence), Waabi (autonomous trucks) and Deep Genomics (RNA-focused AI for disease detection). In addition to Hinton’s Nobel Prize, U of T’s faculty members and graduates have earned many other distinctions, including two Turing Awards, two of the three Herzberg Gold Medals ever awarded to computer scientists, and 15 Sloan Research Fellowships.

The university also consistently attracts and trains the best and most diverse cohort of undergraduate and graduate students from around the world, with hundreds pursuing AI-related studies across the university.

​In addition, U of T is home to an array of AI-focused research initiatives such as the Acceleration Consortium, the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, the Data Sciences Institute and the Temerty Centre for AI Research and Education in Medicine. The university also maintains a close partnership with the Vector Institute, a globally renowned organization co-founded by Geoffrey Hinton that empowers researchers, businesses and governments to develop and adopt AI responsibly.

An impactful partnership: Google and U of T

Establishing the Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence is the latest instance of U of T and Google’s longtime partnership in supporting discovery-based research. Over the years, Google has engaged many AI-focused U of T alumni and academic leaders, including Hinton, and the two organizations are founding partners in Toronto’s Vector Institute. Previous funding from Google has helped position the University of Toronto as a preeminent centre for advanced research in AI, and this new chair will greatly expand this impact.

“We are extremely grateful to Google for partnering with us to establish a chair dedicated to cutting-edge research on the defining technology of our time, which will help generate societal and economic benefits for communities across the planet,” said David Palmer, U of T vice-president, advancement. “Hinton himself once said that real breakthroughs come from people focusing on what they’re excited about, and the Hinton Chair will honour this example by providing unprecedented support for the next era of elemental, curiosity-driven work in artificial intelligence.”

— Original story by the University of Toronto

University of Toronto team discovers vulnerability at hardware-software boundary in cloud systems

From left to right: David Lie, director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute, Gururaj Saileshwar, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, and Yuqin Yan, a student at the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, discovered a security flaw in AMD’s cloud protection technology, revealing how interactions between hardware and software can expose sensitive data. (Photos: provided)

Cloud computing has become an essential part of our everyday lives, both personally and professionally. Whether it’s storing family photos, running a business or training cutting-edge AI models, we rely on remote servers to keep our data safe and secure and trust that it won’t be modified in any way.

Although storing information in the cloud exposes data to potential risks, hardware vendors like AMD mitigate these risks by collaborating with major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, to provide hardware-level protection that is meant to keep data secure and confidential even if the cloud provider experiences a security breach.

However, a team of University of Toronto researchers led by David Lie, director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute (SRI) and Gururaj Saileshwar, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, and executed by Yuqin Yan, a student at the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE), found a flaw in these systems. They discovered that the complex interactions between the software that the cloud providers run, and the hardware-level protection, leads to new security challenges and vulnerabilities.

“Unlike most security vulnerabilities that are found in either the hardware or the software, what sets this discovery apart is that it was found in the interplay between the software and AMD’s hardware” said Lie, who is cross-appointed to the Department of Computer Science. “In this case, it was found when the hypervisor and central processing unit (CPU) interacted.”

We can think of a hypervisor as the “virtual landlord” of AMD’s chips. It is software that “rents” out computing resources, such as memory, to the cloud customer “tenants” allowing various customer workloads to run securely, independently and confidentially on its CPU.

AMD’s confidential computing technology is designed to protect such tenants in the event that the landlord is controlled by a malicious entity; in other words, if it is hacked. It encrypts data in a way that depends on its location within memory, so if the same data is stored in two places, it is encrypted completely differently. That makes it difficult for the hypervisor to know anything about the data or track it across locations, increasing the security of the data.

“The system lets the hypervisor move data around to manage memory efficiently,” explained Lie. “So when data is relocated, AMD’s hardware decrypts it from the old location and re-encrypts it for the new location. But, what we found was that by doing this over and over again, a malicious hypervisor can learn recurring patterns from within the data, which could lead to privacy breaches.”

Vulnerabilities like this have the potential to affect people and organizations alike.

“These are the kinds of unexpected consequences that come from the complexity of modern systems,” said Saileshwar. “The attack we discovered, which we call Relocate-Vote, shows how that complexity, especially at the boundary between secure hardware and untrusted software, can lead to serious vulnerabilities.”

The majority of the research was performed by ECE student Yuqin Yan. It also included now-graduated ECE student Wei Huang, ECE and SRI Postdoctoral Fellow Ilya Grishchenko, and UBC faculty member Aastha Mehta.

“Our role in academia is to identify vulnerabilities in real systems,” said Saileshwar. “I am proud of the work our team did. We are pleased that Yuqin was able to present this paper at the USENIX Security Symposium in Seattle, Washington.”

Going forward, Saileshwar notes that the consequences of hardware security are only going to grow and affect more organizations over time.

“As we move more of our data to the cloud, hardware security is becoming more important than ever,” said Saileshwar. “Hardware is becoming more complex, it’s adding more features all the time, and we’re relying on its security features even more. We’re placing a lot of trust in hardware, making the research our team is doing at the University of Toronto into hardware security issues more impactful than ever.”

For more information about Relocate-Vote, please visit the project website.

Original story by Andrea Wiseman for the Schwartz Reisman Institute

Vanguard and University of Toronto announce strategic artificial intelligence research partnership

(Photo: Matthew Volpe)

Vanguard today announced a new research initiative in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto to advance AI research and innovation for investors and the financial services industry by drawing on the University of Toronto’s world-renowned artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) program.

As part of this collaboration, the University of Toronto Department of Computer Science will establish several labs composed of professors, post-doctoral fellows, and students to collaborate with Vanguard’s existing Toronto-based AI research team. Collectively, they will develop broad AI solutions and insights to address complex business challenges and drive innovation within the financial services industry.

“We are delighted to partner with the University of Toronto, a world-renowned academic institution at the cutting edge of AI innovation and research. This collaboration will not only enhance our capabilities to better serve investors with top-tier expertise and resources but also contribute to the broader field of AI, ultimately benefiting our clients and industry,” said Nitin Tandon, Managing Director and Chief Information Officer, Vanguard.

The initial focus of this initiative and research will include developing greater insight into:

• Responsible AI Principles: Ensuring ethical and transparent use of AI.

• Cognitive AI: Developing AI systems that can understand and interact with humans more naturally.

• Autonomous AI Agents: Creating AI systems capable of independent decision-making.

• Adaptive Frameworks for LLM Training: Enhancing the training of large language models to improve performance and reliability.

“This partnership with Vanguard is a significant step forward in applying AI and ML to the financial services sector. By collaborating with Vanguard’s skilled team, we aim to develop practical AI solutions that can directly improve people’s financial decision-making and outcomes. This collaboration will also provide valuable hands-on opportunities for our students and faculty to work on real-world projects, contributing to Toronto’s status as a global hub for AI research and innovation,” said Eyal de Lara, Professor and Chair of the University of Toronto Department of Computer Science.

“Over the past fourteen years, we have proudly served Canadian investors and we are happy to grow our presence and team in Toronto, a city that is rapidly becoming a global hub for AI innovation and top technology talent,” added Kathy Bock, Managing Director and Head of Vanguard Investments Canada Inc.

Investment in AI Research and Innovation

This program will include co-creating research papers, jointly participating in and hosting meetings, seminars, conferences and recruitment initiatives for research projects. This initiative will expand Vanguard’s AI team in Toronto to 90 roles, along with providing internship opportunities for University of Toronto students.

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About Vanguard

Canadians own CAD $132 billion in Vanguard assets, including Canadian and U.S.-domiciled ETFs and Canadian mutual funds. Vanguard Investments Canada Inc. manages CAD $96 billion in assets (as of April 30, 2025) with 38 Canadian ETFs and ten mutual funds currently available. The Vanguard Group, Inc. is one of the world's largest investment management companies and a leading provider of company-sponsored retirement plan services. Vanguard manages USD $10 trillion (CAD $13.7 trillion) in global assets, including over USD $3.3 trillion (CAD $4.5 trillion) in global ETF assets (as of April 30, 2025). Vanguard has offices in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe and Australia. The firm offers 441 funds, including ETFs, to its more than 50 million investors worldwide.

Vanguard operates under a unique operating structure. Unlike firms that are publicly held or owned by a small group of individuals, The Vanguard Group, Inc. is owned by Vanguard's U.S.-domiciled funds and ETFs. Those funds, in turn, are owned by Vanguard clients. This unique mutual structure aligns Vanguard interests with those of its investors and drives the culture, philosophy, and policies throughout the Vanguard organization worldwide. As a result, Canadian investors benefit from Vanguard's stability and experience, low-cost investing, and client focus. For more information, please visit vanguard.ca.

About the University of Toronto Department of Computer Science

The Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto is a global leader in computing research and education, consistently ranked among the top computer science departments worldwide. Known for its pioneering contributions to areas such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, human-computer interaction and systems, the department fosters a vibrant academic community that brings together world-renowned faculty, innovative researchers, and ambitious students. With strong ties to industry and a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach, U of T’s Department of Computer Science drives technological advancement and prepares graduates to become leaders in academia, industry and beyond.

The University of Toronto, founded in 1827, is Canada’s leading public research university, recognized globally for its academic excellence and innovation. Across its three campuses, the university offers over 700 undergraduate and 200 graduate programs. U of T is home to world-changing discoveries and continues to shape a better future through research, teaching and public impact.

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Media Inquiries:

Matt Hintsa
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Phone: 416-946-4098
matt.hintsa@utoronto.ca

Matt Gierasimczuk
Vanguard Canada Public Relations
Phone: 416-263-7087
matthew_gierasimczuk@vanguard.com