Jürgen Schmidhuber

Jürgen Schmidhuber is a computer scientist most noted for his work in the field of artificial intelligence, deep learning and artificial neural networks. He is a co-director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research (IDSIA) in southern Switzerland. Often called the “father of modern AI,” Schmidhuber has made numerous groundbreaking contributions, particularly in neural networks, which have shaped the field and laid the foundation for many current AI technologies.

Born in Munich, Germany, Schmidhuber pursued his studies at the Technical University of Munich, where he developed a fascination for artificial intelligence and the potential for machines to autonomously improve over time. In the early 1990s, Schmidhuber co-invented the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network with his then-student Sepp Hochreiter, a neural network architecture that addressed many limitations of recurrent neural networks (RNNs). LSTM’s ability to remember important information over long sequences and handle sequential data efficiently has made it integral to today’s language processing applications, including speech recognition, machine translation, and time-series analysis. This achievement became a cornerstone of AI advancements and is widely used in technologies like Google Translate, Siri, and other AI-powered assistants.

Throughout his career, Schmidhuber has focused on creating AI that can learn and improve on its own, ultimately aiming to develop human-level intelligence. He believes AI should be designed to explore and create out of curiosity, which he describes as building "artificial scientists and artists." Schmidhuber has held prominent roles in academia, including at IDSIA, where he has continued pushing the boundaries of AI research. His work has inspired a generation of researchers and has profoundly influenced AI’s trajectory.

He received the Helmholtz Award of the International Neural Network Society in 2013, and the Neural Networks Pioneer Award of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society in 2016. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Schmidhuber is a vocal advocate for the ethical development of AI. His vision emphasizes building systems that contribute positively to society, encouraging debate on AI's role and future in areas from industry to philosophy.