Geoffrey Hinton and University of Toronto alumnus and entrepreneur Allen Lau were among the highlights of the opening day at this year’s influential Collision technology conference. Hinton, a U of T University Professor Emeritus who now works at Google and has been dubbed the “godfather of deep learning,” spoke on Tuesday about his efforts to develop a new type of artificial neural network that can recognize and interpret images better than existing systems. One of more than 600 presenters at the annual conference that runs until April 22, Hinton noted that most current systems use convolutional neural nets that don’t recognize objects the way people do.