Maybe LeNet from LeCun et. al? It was before my time, but the architecture is still influential. The more important paper would probably be Phoneme Recognition

Maybe LeNet from LeCun et. al? It was before my time, but the architecture is still influential. The more important paper would probably be Phoneme Recognition Using Time-Delay Neural Networks, which introduces Time-Delay NNs, from which ConvNets arise naturally. Other architectures, like Sepp Hochreiter; Jürgen Schmidhuber (1997): "Long short-term memory", should also be mentioned. Not sure which paper would be the most important for SVMs. I don't know what to do about concepts that took a long time to develop, like backpropagation. Research is usually incremental.