https://people.idsia.ch//~juergen/critique-honda-prize-hinto...

I stopped reading at [backpropagation] "wasn't created by "lots of different people" but by exactly one person who published first [BP1] and therefore should get the credit". Okay, so he was the first. Brilliant insight. Hugely valuable. He should get credit for that, and I'm very sympathetic if that hasn't happened (I don't follow other research enough to make any strong statement about if he has or hasn't received appropriate recognition). But that was 50 years ago and many equally insightful and impactful developments have gotten us to the point where backpropagation is being done in a practical way. "Exactly one person" is ridiculous.

When I say it’s his shtick, I mean that he basically brings it up whenever possible. When another big name in the field receives an award, he’ll write up a huge blog post about how ackshually they didn’t invent XYZ, but rather modified A and B, which is related to work C he did at his lab in 1980.

See https://people.idsia.ch//~juergen/critique-honda-prize-hinto...

https://people.idsia.ch//~juergen/naturedeepmind.html

https://people.idsia.ch//~juergen/critique-turing-award-beng...

At 1:03:00 in this video he interrupts a lecture at NIPS from Goodfellow (another leader in the field) to try and claim credit for the subject of the lecture in a sort of slimy way. https://youtube.com/watch?v=HGYYEUSm-0Q&feature=share

Honestly I’m not equipped to tell whether Schmidhuber’s claims are true since I haven’t followed the progression of ML research since the 1980s - but the impression I get of him is that he’s kind of a jackass who’s willing to spend a ton of time tearing others down in really petty ways. If there is some truth to his claims, perhaps the reason he’s unrecognized is because he’s a bit of an ass to work with?