background from the great Genius Makers history of ML:
The press needed heroes for its AI narrative. It chose Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, and sometimes Ng, thanks largely to the promotional efforts of Google and Facebook. The narrative did not extend to Jürgen Schmidhuber, the German researcher based on Lake Lugano who carried the torch for neural networks in Europe during the 1990s and 2000s. Some took issue with Schmidhuber's exclusion, including Schmidhuber. In 2005, he and Alex Graves, the researcher who later joined DeepMind, had published a paper describing a speech recognition system based on LSTMs-neural networks with short-term memory. "This is that crazy Schmidhuber stuff," Hinton had told himself, "but it actually works." Now the technology was powering speech services at companies like Google and Microsoft, and Schmidhuber wanted his due. After Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio published a paper on the rise of deep learning in Nature, he wrote a critique arguing that "the Canadians" weren't as influential as they influence would soon reverberate across the industry-Schmidhuber stood up in the audience and chastised him for not citing similar work in Switzerland from the 1990s. He did this kind of thing so often, it became its own verb-as in: "You have been Schmidhubered."
The press needed heroes for its AI narrative. It chose Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, and sometimes Ng, thanks largely to the promotional efforts of Google and Facebook. The narrative did not extend to Jürgen Schmidhuber, the German researcher based on Lake Lugano who carried the torch for neural networks in Europe during the 1990s and 2000s. Some took issue with Schmidhuber's exclusion, including Schmidhuber. In 2005, he and Alex Graves, the researcher who later joined DeepMind, had published a paper describing a speech recognition system based on LSTMs-neural networks with short-term memory. "This is that crazy Schmidhuber stuff," Hinton had told himself, "but it actually works." Now the technology was powering speech services at companies like Google and Microsoft, and Schmidhuber wanted his due. After Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio published a paper on the rise of deep learning in Nature, he wrote a critique arguing that "the Canadians" weren't as influential as they influence would soon reverberate across the industry-Schmidhuber stood up in the audience and chastised him for not citing similar work in Switzerland from the 1990s. He did this kind of thing so often, it became its own verb-as in: "You have been Schmidhubered."