Any claim Schmidhuber might have is always drowned out by how obstinate he is about demanding recognition.
He’s interrupted lectures at major conferences from other leaders in in the field to quibble about citations unrelated to the subject of the lecture - pretty much everything he does involves some whining about how the credit for his work has been stolen from him. It’s hard to take his claims seriously when he’s this pigheaded.
Miron Livny does this too. He created the Condor project (a batch queue/executor system) and always interrupted talks about distributed computing to say he did it first.
Very few peoople used Condor because it was too hard to configure.
There’s a blast from the past… I actually built a headless opportunistic cluster using condor back in grad school so I could steal cpu cycles from the windows computer lab over nights and weekends.
yes but condor added a number of things that other folks later copied and (according to livny) didn't provide enough credit for, including (but not limited to) containers, glide-in, federation, secure communications, matchmaking (classads).
I actually like Schmidhuber, and I don't mind his boisterous arrogance, but you have to admit there was a heavy dose of Schadenfreude there in him missing out of the Turing awarded jointly to Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio.
This is the one bit where I felt he was under-recognised. LSTMs for example are 100% his team’s work and that’s been a major thread in ANNs. Plus all the other bits...
I stopped reading at [backpropagation] "wasn't created by "lots of different people" but by exactly one person who published first [BP1] and therefore should get the credit". Okay, so he was the first. Brilliant insight. Hugely valuable. He should get credit for that, and I'm very sympathetic if that hasn't happened (I don't follow other research enough to make any strong statement about if he has or hasn't received appropriate recognition). But that was 50 years ago and many equally insightful and impactful developments have gotten us to the point where backpropagation is being done in a practical way. "Exactly one person" is ridiculous.
His schtick is claiming he’s real “father of deep learning” and that all major work in ML has been built off of work done in his lab, and that he’s unjustly remained unrecognized while other pioneers in the field have received tons of awards and compensation from big tech companies.
When I say it’s his shtick, I mean that he basically brings it up whenever possible. When another big name in the field receives an award, he’ll write up a huge blog post about how ackshually they didn’t invent XYZ, but rather modified A and B, which is related to work C he did at his lab in 1980.
At 1:03:00 in this video he interrupts a lecture at NIPS from Goodfellow (another leader in the field) to try and claim credit for the subject of the lecture in a sort of slimy way.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HGYYEUSm-0Q&feature=share
Honestly I’m not equipped to tell whether Schmidhuber’s claims are true since I haven’t followed the progression of ML research since the 1980s - but the impression I get of him is that he’s kind of a jackass who’s willing to spend a ton of time tearing others down in really petty ways. If there is some truth to his claims, perhaps the reason he’s unrecognized is because he’s a bit of an ass to work with?
Tangent: While I've listened to him on podcasts, and am reading his Deep Learning textbook, this is the first time I've seen Goodfellow in person. I'm crushed to see that he is not, as I assumed, some 60 year old professor who has spent decades earning his expertise, and instead is someone young enough to pass as a college student!
I'm curious, if his claim is correct, (and it seems like, from domain experts in this thread and others, he is), why has he seemingly not been recognized for his work, so consistently?
Also, assuming he is correct, what other alternative does he have for getting recognition? Everyone says this particular approach is obnoxious (making blog posts, interrupting conferences), but what non-obnoxious approaches are there to correct a deeply-entrenched mistake about NN-development credit? (I am genuinely curious here, I don't know enough about the CS research field to know if there is in fact alternative forums/channels to address something like this more politely).
The LeCunn response is gone because Google+ is gone but I would love to hear the counter claims. I couldn't find anything googling it.
If anyone has this handy, please post it.
He’s interrupted lectures at major conferences from other leaders in in the field to quibble about citations unrelated to the subject of the lecture - pretty much everything he does involves some whining about how the credit for his work has been stolen from him. It’s hard to take his claims seriously when he’s this pigheaded.