The award is presented annually by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society in recognition of outstanding contributions that have made the future field of neural networks possible in the first place. The jury takes research over a period of 15 years into account. AI pioneer Sepp Hochreiter, head of the JKU Institute for Machine Learning and the LIT AI Lab, was presented with the prestigious award.

About Sepp Hochreiter

Born in Bavaria, Sepp Hochreiter has been the head of the Institute for Machine Learning at the JKU since 2006. Prior to coming to the JKU, he worked at the TU Berlin, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and at the TU Munich. Prof. Hochreiter developed the idea of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) as early as 1991 as part of his his Diploma degree thesis. The first groundbreaking paper about LSTM was published in 1997.
Hochreiter's research focuses on machine learning methods, deep learning in particular, long short term memory, representational learning, as well as bi-clustering, matrix factorization, and statistical methods. Research applications range from analyzing biological data (next-generation sequencing, microarrays and protein/peptide arrays, protein and RNA structures / mass spectrometry) and pharmaceuticals (prediction models in drug development), to clinical studies, autonomous systems, computer vision, and e-commerce.