Backpropagation
2 milestones in AI history
ResearchFirst AI Winter
Backpropagation Discovered (Initially Ignored)
Paul Werbos described the backpropagation algorithm in his PhD thesis — a method for training multi-layer neural networks by propagating errors backward through the network. However, in the anti-neural-network climate of the 1970s, the work went largely unnoticed.
Paul WerbosHarvard University
ResearchExpert Systems Boom
Backpropagation Rediscovered
Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams published 'Learning Representations by Back-propagating Errors' in Nature, demonstrating that backpropagation could train multi-layer neural networks effectively. The same year, the PDP (Parallel Distributed Processing) group published their influential two-volume work on connectionism.
David RumelhartGeoffrey HintonUC San DiegoCarnegie Mellon University