Since age 15, the main goal of Jürgen Schmidhuber has been to build a self-improving Artificial Intelligence (AI) smarter than himself, then retire. He is often called the father of modern AI. His lab's deep learning neural networks such as LSTM have revolutionized machine learning, are now on 3 billion smartphones, and used billions of times per day, for Facebook's automatic translation (2017), Google's speech recognition (since 2015), Apple's Siri & QuickType, Amazon's Alexa, etc. He also pioneered unsupervised adversarial networks, artificial curiosity and meta-learning machines that learn to learn. Prof. Schmidhuber is a director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, recipient of numerous awards, and chief scientist of the company NNAISENSE, which aims at building the first practical general purpose AI. He is also advising various governments on AI strategies.
Michael Wand is a Senior Researcher at the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, where he works on bridging the gap between foundational research on neural networks and challenging state-of-the-art applications. He has made substantial contributions to the emerging field of biosignal-based speech recognition, with applications for speech prostheses and covert communication; in 2010, his demonstration system was voted among the top ten attractions on the CeBIT IT fair. Further areas of his work include versatile hand prosthesis control (INPUT H2020 project) as well as fusion of modalities for increasing robustness of automatic systems.
