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Comment by 2sk21 | Hacker News Reader

I got one of the earliest PhDs in neural networks (in 1992!), and my dissertation about improving back propagation. Even though I actually saw how well it worked, I somehow had no faith in the technology as it seemed like a toy due to the hopelessly slow processors we had at the time. I did implement back propagation on a Connection Machine CM2 but found it too complex and ultimately wound up running my code on a bunch of IBM RS 6000 workstations instead.

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You know this, but among others Werbos (dissertation 1974, the one you were building on) would probably raise an eyebrow at your "earliest" assertion :)

NN have been cyclical for decades now and I expect they'll cycle again.

You are right. I got caught in the wave of excitement after the Rumelhart, McLelland and Hinton PDP book chapter of 1986. But as you say, there were a lot of things that had already been done in NN going back to perceptrons. My first exposure to neural networks was in 1987 in Byte magazine of all places. There was a great article by Bart Kosko on associative memories.

That's awesome. Have you gotten back to working on them? (seems like you'd have your literal pick of contracts atleast 5-10 years ago)

When I graduated, there were absolutely no jobs in machine learning and I used to get blank looks when I told people about my work. Fortunately, I was able to get a job in the systems field and worked there for many years. I was able to get back into machine learning about 8 years ago and am semi-retired now.

I'm not complaining as I was always well paid in my career. But sometimes, being too early in a field can be as bad as being too late :-)

I think my classmate might have read your dissertation in 1994 possibly. Were you cited or inspired magazine articles?

Over the years, I have acquired a fair number of citations for my papers which were mostly published in IEEE Transactions in Neural Networks. But I am certain that my work did not inspire any magazine articles - the field was considered too far away from mainstream CS at the time. There was even grumbling from some faculty in my CS department that my dissertation should not have been in CS but rather in statistics :-)

I am still getting about a new citation every month for one of my papers that was published 27 years ago!

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