‘Father of Artificial Intelligence” and groundbreaking pioneer in deep learning
Switzerland
Since age 15 or so, the main goal of Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber has been to build a self-improving Artificial Intelligence (AI) smarter than himself, and then retire. His lab’s Deep Learning Neural Networks (NNs) based on ideas published in the “Annus Mirabilis” have revolutionised machine learning and AI.
In 1990, he introduced unsupervised generative adversarial neural networks that fight each other in a minimax game to implement artificial curiosity (the famous GANs are instances thereof). In 1991, he introduced neural fast weight programmers formally equivalent to what’s now called Transformers with linearized self-attention (popular in natural language processing). His formal theory of creativity & curiosity & fun explains art, science, music, and humour.
His lab’s NNs are now heavily used in healthcare and medicine, helping to make human lives longer and healthier. His research group also established the fields of mathematically rigorous universal AI and recursive self-improvement in metalearning machines that learn to learn (since 1987).
In 2009, the CTC-trained Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) of his team was the first recurrent NN to win international pattern recognition competitions. In 2010, his lab’s fast and deep feedforward NNs on GPUs greatly outperformed previous methods, without using any unsupervised pre-training, a popular deep learning strategy that he pioneered in 1991.
By the mid-2010s, his lab’s NNs were on 3 billion devices, and used billions of times per day by users of the world’s most valuable public companies, e.g., for greatly improved speech recognition on all Android smartphones, greatly improved machine translation through Google Translate and Facebook (over 4 billion LSTM-based translations per day), Apple’s Siri and Quicktype on all iPhones, the answers of Amazon’s Alexa, and numerous other applications.
In 2011, the DanNet of his team was the first feedforward NN to win computer vision contests, achieving superhuman performance. In 2012, they had the first deep NN to win a medical imaging contest (on cancer detection). This deep learning revolution quickly spread from Europe to North America and Asia and attracted enormous interest from industry.
In May 2015, his team published the Highway Net, the first working deep feedforward NN with hundreds of layers—its open-gated version called ResNet (Dec 2015) has become the most cited NN of the 21st century, LSTM the most cited NN of the 20th (Bloomberg called LSTM the arguably most commercial AI achievement). He also generalized algorithmic information theory and the many-worlds theory of physics and introduced the concept of Low-Complexity Art, the information age’s extreme form of minimal art.
Despite his many accomplishments, at the age of 60, Schmidhuber feels mounting time pressure toward building an Artificial General Intelligence within his lifetime and remains committed to pushing the boundaries of AI research and development. He is currently director of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology AI Initiative, scientific director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA and co-founder and chief scientist of the AI company Nnaisense, whose motto is “AI∀”—a math-inspired way of saying “AI For All.”
He continues to work on cutting-edge AI technologies and applications to improve human health extend human lives and make lives easier for everyone.
Jürgen Schmidhuber – Speaker
Professor Schmidhuber is a world-renowned scientist and internationally acclaimed speaker on deep learning and artificial intelligence. Considered the ‘father of AI’, he is 100% clued up on the latest developments and their applications, while his groundbreaking research is shaping the face of the future. Jürgen Schmidhuber has had one goal in life – to build a self-improving form of artificial intelligence (AI) that was smarter than himself. He thought, at the time, that when he had accomplished his mission, he would simply retire. Jürgen has still not retired.
Speaking Topics
Jürgen Schmidhuber is a singular individual who can talk on all aspects of deep learning, i.e. machine learning, and AI. He is the man behind the algorithms used by most applications that are currently used daily and has the insights to determine the role AI will play in our immediate lives as well as the future.