4 ms·

Honestly, I think the title from the New York Times as "the father of AI" is a bit presumptuous. I'm not an expert by any means in machine learning or artificia

by cr0sh 10y ago

Honestly, I think the title from the New York Times as "the father of AI" is a bit presumptuous. I'm not an expert by any means in machine learning or artificial intelligence, but I do know a fair amount about computer history. Potential "father of modern AI" - even that is stretching a bit! The fact is, machine learning and artificial intelligence is a story in history of fits and starts; of springs and winters; of successes and failures. If anyone could be called such, the fathers of AI would belong to Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts in 1943, who came up with the model for an artificial neuron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neuron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neuron From there, it was people standing on each other's shoulders, building ever upward and outward. These steps and systems have ultimately led to today's deep learning networks. Other machine learning techniques trace to various techniques and methods in statistics and probability theory; then you have the whole arena of computer/machine vision research. Right now, we're in the midst of yet another AI/ML "spring", after a fairly long "winter". Mr. Schmidhuber can certainly claim a bit of status as being one of many who help institute a thaw leading to today - but he is by no means alone (I'd argue that one of the earliest for today's thaw might be Lecun).

ppod 10y ago
Schmidhuber has a fair claim to being the father of successful connectionist AI. Others would be Hinton and LeCun. Schmidhuber is maybe a bit of a controversial figure, he's quite open about insisting on getting his credit for his early research and upset when the credit for the connectionist resurrection goes mainly to others such as Hinton instead of him. He is certainly the inventor of LSTMs at least.
- obstbraende 10y ago
  If we want to assign credit for the LSTM to one person, his student Hochreiter is perhaps the better pick
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
>> If anyone could be called such, the fathers of AI would belong to Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts in 1943, who came up with the model for an artificial neuron The work of McCulloch and Pitts was seminal in the field of connectionism, itself a sub-field of AI (and the field that encompasses neural networks, but not machine learning in general). The Pitts-McCulloch neuron was only one of their many contributions. Pitts in particular later published a great deal on inductive inference, which is more straight-forward, Good, Old-Fashioned AI. AI goes way back, with the work of Turing and Von Neumann, and even Russel and the Logicians- not a Ska band, but a group of mathematicians who wrote about symbolic logic: Hillbert and Gödel being the most well-known among them. We have digital computers today, because these gentlemen (and some ladies among them) came up with the maths that enabled it. In their time, "artificial intelligence" pretty much meant a machine like the one we're using right now to communicate. There was a small army of bright personalities that followed in their wake. Just off the top of my head (and completely arbitrarily; most of them are my personal heroes of AI): Marvin Minsky Roger Schank Mark E. Gold Dana Angluin J. Ross Quinlan Peter Norvig Eugene Charniak David H. Warren Daniel Jurafsky Robert A. Kowalksi John McCarthy Steve Russel Christopher D. Manning Terry Winograd Edward Feigenbaum Geoff Hinton Carl Eddie Hewitt Richard O' Keefe Pat Langley George F. Luger Ryszard S. Michalski Seymour Aubrey Papert Judea Pearl Fernando Pereira Steven Pinker Frank Rosenblatt David Everett Rumelhart James Lloyd McClelland Stuart Russel John Rogers Searle Rodney Allen Brooks Claude bloody Shannon Paul Smolensky Gerald Jay Sussman Richard S. Sutton Katia Sycara Leslie Gabriel Valiant Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik Norbert Wiener Joseph Weizenbaum Paul J. Werbos James H. Martin Hinrich Schütze Ehud Shapiro Stephen Muggleton Leon Sterling Alain Colmerauer ... I've taken care to list all those people with as much detail in their names as I could find on wikipedia. This should help you identify them and read about their contributions to the field, which I strongly suggest anyone does before attempting to discuss the history of AI, in any detail and at any depth.
- nl 10y ago
  Claude bloody Shannon ;) I was going to say that I think Marvin Minsky deserves to be on that list, especially if we are talking about the rise and fall and rise again of neural networks. Especially the fall part. Then I noticed he was first on the list and I'd just scrolled.
- MR4D 10y ago
  John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence", so regardless of everything else, he at least fathered the term. Some great names on that list, too!
ktRolster 10y ago
"In 1997, he co-authored a seminal paper that laid the groundwork for modern AI systems." Any idea what that paper was? I thought the groundwork for modern AI systems was laid already by 1997, but maybe I'm wrong?
- ma2rten 10y ago
  Long Short-Term Memory

by cr0sh 10y ago

ppod 10y ago

Schmidhuber has a fair claim to being the father of successful connectionist AI. Others would be Hinton and LeCun. Schmidhuber is maybe a bit of a controversial figure, he's quite open about insisting on getting his credit for his early research and upset when the credit for the connectionist resurrection goes mainly to others such as Hinton instead of him. He is certainly the inventor of LSTMs at least.

obstbraende 10y ago
If we want to assign credit for the LSTM to one person, his student Hochreiter is perhaps the better pick

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

>> If anyone could be called such, the fathers of AI would belong to Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts in 1943, who came up with the model for an artificial neuron The work of McCulloch and Pitts was seminal in the field of connectionism, itself a sub-field of AI (and the field that encompasses neural networks, but not machine learning in general). The Pitts-McCulloch neuron was only one of their many contributions. Pitts in particular later published a great deal on inductive inference, which is more straight-forward, Good, Old-Fashioned AI. AI goes way back, with the work of Turing and Von Neumann, and even Russel and the Logicians- not a Ska band, but a group of mathematicians who wrote about symbolic logic: Hillbert and Gödel being the most well-known among them. We have digital computers today, because these gentlemen (and some ladies among them) came up with the maths that enabled it. In their time, "artificial intelligence" pretty much meant a machine like the one we're using right now to communicate. There was a small army of bright personalities that followed in their wake. Just off the top of my head (and completely arbitrarily; most of them are my personal heroes of AI): Marvin Minsky Roger Schank Mark E. Gold Dana Angluin J. Ross Quinlan Peter Norvig Eugene Charniak David H. Warren Daniel Jurafsky Robert A. Kowalksi John McCarthy Steve Russel Christopher D. Manning Terry Winograd Edward Feigenbaum Geoff Hinton Carl Eddie Hewitt Richard O' Keefe Pat Langley George F. Luger Ryszard S. Michalski Seymour Aubrey Papert Judea Pearl Fernando Pereira Steven Pinker Frank Rosenblatt David Everett Rumelhart James Lloyd McClelland Stuart Russel John Rogers Searle Rodney Allen Brooks Claude bloody Shannon Paul Smolensky Gerald Jay Sussman Richard S. Sutton Katia Sycara Leslie Gabriel Valiant Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik Norbert Wiener Joseph Weizenbaum Paul J. Werbos James H. Martin Hinrich Schütze Ehud Shapiro Stephen Muggleton Leon Sterling Alain Colmerauer ... I've taken care to list all those people with as much detail in their names as I could find on wikipedia. This should help you identify them and read about their contributions to the field, which I strongly suggest anyone does before attempting to discuss the history of AI, in any detail and at any depth.

nl 10y ago
Claude bloody Shannon ;) I was going to say that I think Marvin Minsky deserves to be on that list, especially if we are talking about the rise and fall and rise again of neural networks. Especially the fall part. Then I noticed he was first on the list and I'd just scrolled.
MR4D 10y ago
John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence", so regardless of everything else, he at least fathered the term. Some great names on that list, too!

ktRolster 10y ago

"In 1997, he co-authored a seminal paper that laid the groundwork for modern AI systems." Any idea what that paper was? I thought the groundwork for modern AI systems was laid already by 1997, but maybe I'm wrong?

ma2rten 10y ago
Long Short-Term Memory