This is the kind of work that is essential for our future --so thank you. I'm quite (positively) surprised Sam decided to fund this; we definitely need to put more effort and resources as a civilization to work like this.
I'll hopefully have a lot more to say in the future, and will definitely be reaching out in a more substantive way... But in the meantime, a quick word of advice: This will sound strange, since Hinton's work is quite powerful as it is, but my guess is that good-old boosting / \ell_1-regularized ensemble learning methods would work much better for this particular problem domain --so please run some experiments and look into it, if you haven't already. It's hard to find good and up-to-date literature on this (nowadays) less fashionable work (a good rule of thumb: if it mentions 'random forests', it is not well-informed enough), but Freund and Schapire's recent book [1] is self-contained and a jewel to read back-to-back. Best of luck.