many think the Turing award committee made a mistake in 2019, even the big reddit post Hinton, LeCun, Bengio receive ACM Turing Award (680 upvotes) was mostly about Jurgen

a while ago there was a fun post We find it extremely unfair that Schmidhuber did not get the Turing award. That is why we dedicate this song to Juergen to cheer him up. but I bet the 2020 award would cheer him up even more, maybe it’s just that nobody nominated him in 2019, probably one has to be well-connected for that, some call him an outsider, but perhaps we can have some sort of grass-roots movement, someone should nominate him for the 2020 Turing award, I cannot do it myself, not senior enough, the nominator must be a “recognized member of the community,” it may help to have more than one nominator, here the nomination form and CV and publications: Next Deadline January 15, 2020 – End of Day, Anywhere on Earth (AoE), UTC -12 hrs

they also want supporting letters from at least 4, and not more than 8, endorsers, they should be well-known researchers, many of them are here on reddit and might read this, for example, Yoshua replied to a recent post, although something tells me he won’t write a supporting letter, but I hope your colleagues will

to find material for this, look at Jurgen’s very dense blog post on their annus mirabilis 1990-1991 with Sepp Hochreiter and other students, this overview has many original references and additional links, also on what happened in the decades after 1991 and its impact on industry and the world, I learned a lot from it and made digestible chunks for several reddit posts, with many supportive comments:

1. Jurgen Schmidhuber really had GANs in 1990 (560 upvotes), he did not call it GAN, he called it curiosity, it’s actually famous work, GANs are a simple application thereof, GANs were mentioned in the Turing laudation, it’s both funny and sad that Yoshua got a Turing award for a principle that Jurgen invented decades before him

2. DanNet, the CUDA CNN of Dan Ciresan in Jurgen Schmidhuber’s team, won 4 image recognition challenges prior to AlexNet (280), DanNet won ICDAR 2011 Chinese handwriting, IJCNN 2011 traffic signs, ISBI 2012 brain segmentation, ICPR 2012 cancer detection, DanNet was the first superhuman CNN in 2011

3. Five major deep learning papers by Geoff Hinton did not cite similar earlier work by Jurgen Schmidhuber (490): First Very Deep NNs, Based on Unsupervised Pre-Training (1991), Compressing / Distilling one Neural Net into Another (1991), Learning Sequential Attention with NNs (1990), Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (1990), Geoff was editor of Jurgen’s 1990 paper, later he published closely related work, but he did not cite

of course, don’t take my word for it, when unsure, follow the links to the original references and study them, that’s what I did, that’s what made me sure about this

unlike Geoff & Yoshua & Yann, Jurgen also credits the pioneers who came long before him, as evident from the following posts:

1. Jurgen Schmidhuber on Seppo Linnainmaa, inventor of backpropagation in 1970 (250), the recent Turing award laudation refers to Yann’s variants of backpropagation and Geoff’s computational experiments with backpropagation, without clarifying that the method was invented by others, this post got a reddit gold award, thanks a lot for that!

2. Jurgen Schmidhuber on Alexey Ivakhnenko, godfather of deep learning 1965 (100), Ivakhnenko started deep learning before the first Turing award was created, but he passed away in 2007, one cannot nominate him any longer

the following posts refer to earlier posts of mine, thanks for that:

1. NeurIPS 2019 Bengio Schmidhuber Meta-Learning Fiasco (530), this shows that Jurgen had meta-learning first in 1987, long before Yoshua

2. The 1997 LSTM paper by Hochreiter & Schmidhuber has become the most cited deep learning research paper of the 20th century (410), this was about counting citations, LSTM has passed the backpropagation papers by Rumelhart et al. (1985, 1986, 1987) and also the most cited paper by Yann and Yoshua (1998) which is about CNNs, Jurgen also calls Sepp’s 1991 thesis “one of the most important documents in the history of machine learning” in The Blog, btw one should also nominate Seppo and Sepp, both highly deserving

Jurgen can be very charming, like in this youtube video of a talk in London “let’s look ahead to a time when the universe is going to be a thousand times older than it is now,” probably irrelevant for this award, but cool, and here is the video of a recent short talk at NeurIPS 2019 on his GANs of 1990 starting at 1:30, there are additional videos with many more clicks

if you are in a position to nominate, or you know someone who is, why not try this, I know, professors have little time, and there are only two weeks left until the deadline, but Jurgen and his students have done so much for our field