Habilitation
August 1993: qualification for tenure professorship in
computer science (at age 30, German average close to 40),
Technische Universität München (TUM).
Postdoctoral thesis: ``Net Architectures,
Objective Functions, and Chain Rule''. Referees:
Profs C. v. d. Malsburg, W. Brauer (supervisor), B. Radig.
PhD
1988-1991:
preparation of ``very good''
PhD thesis on ``Dynamic Neural Nets and the
Fundamental Spatio-Temporal Credit Assignment Problem'' at
TUM. Defense: January 1991. Referees: Profs W. Brauer (supervisor),
K. Schulten.
Diploma
1983 - 1987:
4 year study of computer science and mathematics at
TUM (average is 6.05 years). ``Very good'' diploma degree.
Current / Recent Titles and Positions
Director
of the Swiss AI Lab
IDSIA, Lugano, Switzerland,
since March 1995.
ProfessorSUPSI
in Manno (Switzerland) since January 2003.
Previous Positions
Oberassistent
at TUM (somewhat comparable to an assistant professor in the US):
October 1993 - February 1995. Privatdozent since
January 1995.
Postdoc
at University of Colorado at Boulder (CU):
July 1991 - December 1992. (Declined postdoc
offer by Caltech.)
Research Associate
at TUM: March 1991 - June 1991
Graphic Designer
in a printery: 1982 - 1983
Military Service -
Obligatory service in German Army 1981 - 1982.
Alumni
As of 2011: Ten previous
PhD students and postdocs of JS became professors at various universities.
Best Papers
JS thinks his best papers were published in journals or at
conferences without best paper awards.
Nevertheless, he got best paper awards at (1) GECCO 2005, (2) GECCO 2009, (3) AGI 2010 (Kurzweil Prize), (4) AGI 2011 (Kurzweil Prize), as well as additional best paper nominations at GECCO 2005, IROS 2006, GECCO 2009, GECCO 2010.
1st Prizes in International Competitions
The deep/recurrent neural networks developed in the lab of JS won many pattern recognition contests:
6. IJCNN 2011 on-site Traffic Sign Recognition Competition (0.56% error rate, the only method outperforming humans, August 2011).
5. ICDAR 2011 Chinese Handwriting Recognition Competition (1st & 2nd rank; June 2011).
4. Online German Traffic Sign Recognition Contest (1st & 2nd rank; 1.02% error rate, January 2011).
3. ICDAR 2009 Arabic Connected Handwriting Competition (like the competitions below
won by multi-dimensional LSTM recurrent neural networks trained by CTC).
2. ICDAR 2009 Handwritten Farsi/Arabic Character Recognition Competition.
1. ICDAR 2009 French Connected Handwriting Competition.
More, even
more.
1st Ranks in Important Machine Learning Benchmarks
Methods developed in the lab of JS also set records in many benchmarks, including
the following famous ones:
4. MNIST handwritten digits data set (perhaps the most famous machine
learning benchmark). New record (0.35% error rate) in 2010, broken
in June 2011 (0.27%), finally: human-competitive performance in Dec 2011 (0.23%)
for the first time in the history of this iconic benchmark.
3. NORB Object Recognition Benchmark, NYU, 2004. New records in 2011.
2. CIFAR-10 Object Recognition Benchmark, U. Toronto, 2009. New records in 2011.
1. Human Action Recognition Benchmarks, Weizmann Inst. and KTH. New records in 2010.
More.
Invited Talks
Numerous invited keynote talks / plenary talks at
international conferences,
e. g., TEDx talk 2012 (TEDxLausanne),
IJCNN 2011 in San Jose, California,
World Science Festival 2011 in New York City,
SILC 2011 in San Francisco,
Oxford Winter Conference on Intelligence 2011,
Joint Conferences ECML 2010 / PKDD 2010 in Barcelona (Banquet Talk),
GPTP 2010 in Ann Arbor (25th anniversary of GP), Singularity Summit 2009 in New York City,
AGI 2009 in Washington, ICANN 2008 in Prague, Artificial Cognitive Systems 2008 in Munich,
KES 2008 in Zagreb,
ALT 2007 & DS 2007 in Sendai, Japan (the only joint invited lecture),
ACAT 2007 in Amsterdam, Art Meets Science 2007 in Munich,
Zuse Symposium 2006 in Berlin, GWAL 2006, Turing Days 2006 in Istanbul, ICANN 2005 in Warsaw,
NN 2005 in Porto, Data Ecologies 2005 in Linz, ANNIE 2004 in St. Louis, NN 2004 in Porto, AAMAS 2004 in Leeds,
and others. Many additional invited talks at
leading universities and institutes,
e. g., Caltech, Stanford,
Cambridge, Gatsby, King's College, Hongkong, Singapore, Kyoto, Tokyo,
ETHZ, EPFL, Princeton, MIT, Harvard, etc.
Academy
2008: Nominated and elected to the
Academia Scientiarum et Artium Europaea, the
European Academy of Sciences and Arts, whose 1317 members include numerous Nobel laureates, renowned
architects and artists, and the Pope.
Nonacademic Recognition
X-Lab Survey:
2 years after JS became director
of IDSIA (which then consisted of 5 people),
the 1997 "X-Lab Survey" by the US journal Business Week
Magazine ranked IDSIA among the world's top ten AI labs
(the other members of the top 10 club are much larger than IDSIA).
IDSIA also was ranked 4th in the category "biologically inspired."
Who's who:
Unsolicited entry (since the 1990s) in Marquis' ``Who's who in the world?''
(seems to pick one out of 150,000)
Scientific Service
Member
of editorial boards of various journals
PC Member
of numerous conferences
Referee
for all major journals and conferences in the field
Regular reviewer of proposals to
EU, NSF (US), SNF (Swiss), NWO (Dutch),
DFG (German), Humboldt (German),
and other international grant providers
Teaching
Lectures at TUM, UC Boulder, Univ. Lugano,
in German or English,
on artificial intelligence,
bio-inspired optimization and machine learning
(introductory and advanced),
neural networks,
mathematically optimal general problem solvers,
algorithmic information theory and its applications.
Practical machine learning lab courses
and seminars on numerous AI topics
such as computer vision, evolutionary algorithms,
statistical learning theory, music & computer science,
game theory, and others.
Fellowships
Habilitation:
DFG-fellowship for ``Habilitation''
Postdoc:
DFG-fellowship for postdocs
PhD:
grad student fellowship from SIEMENS AG
Grants
Before 2002:
Since the early 1990s involved in numerous research grants worth
several million US$. Sources: Industry, DFG, SNF, EU, BMFT.
Since 2002:
Value of own direct funding (without funding for project partners) through new competitive
projects starting/acquired since 2002 (without ongoing pre-2002 projects): over CHF 3.5m + over
EUR 4m > US$ 9m (at exchange rates of 1.1.2012). (Total funding for all project partners
was many times higher.)
JS' direct external funding since 2009 at IDSIA: EUR 3'088'543 + CHF 1'569'166 >
US$ 5.6m. Sources include EU, SNF, Industry.
JS also was one of the original PIs of the Excellence Cluster
Cognitive Technical Systems. Total funding: > US$ 8m/year for 5 years, as part of the Excellence
Initiative (> US$ 2.5 billion for 2006-2011),
which selected Munich's TUM and LMU as two of the three
German "Elite Universities".
Citations
This top 10,000 citeseer list
of 26 February 2008
(selected from roughly 1 million computer science authors)
finds over 2,000 references to the work of JS, but such lists
are highly questionable and obviously cannot tell us much about true impact:
Alan Turing
himself has less than 1,500 cites there - many scientists with comparatively negligible impact rank higher than him, and the superheroes of theory (Kurt Goedel) and hardware (Konrad Zuse) are not even on the list.
At Google Scholar, JS's most cited paper is "Long
Short-Term Memory'' (with Sepp Hochreiter),
with over 500 cites or 250 per co-author.
Compare: JS's IDSIA-codirector
Luca Maria Gambardella
& ex-IDSIA senior Marco Dorigo
have single original papers with >3,000 cites or >1,500 cites per co-author
(although original work normally gets fewer citations than surveys and textbooks). And
to put things in a global perspective:
The highest-cited single author paper ever
(by Swiss biologist U. K. Laemmli)
has a record-breaking 200,000 citations
per co-author. JS wrote in Citation bubble about to burst? (Nature, vol. 469, p. 34, 2011): "Like the less-than-worthless collateralized debt obligations that drove the recent financial bubble, and unlike concrete goods and real exports, citations are easy to print and inflate.
Financial deregulation led to short-term incentives for bankers and rating agencies to overvalue their CDOs, bringing down entire economies. Likewise, today's academic rankings provide an incentive for professors to maximize citation counts instead of scientific progress [...] We may already be in the middle of a citation bubble - witness how relatively unknown scientists can now collect more citations than the most influential founders of their fields [...] Note that I write from the country with the most citations per capita and per scientist."
Languages
English:
fluent
German:
fluent (mother tongue)
French:
corrupted by Italian, but
can make slow conversation
Italian:
can order pizza. Currently improving.
Personal
Born:
17.1.1963 in München.
Sex:
male
Citizenship:
German; Swiss permit C.
Full title:
Univ. Prof. USI
Prof. SUPSI Dr. rer. nat. TUM Dr. rer. nat. habil. TUM Dipl. Inf. Univ. TUM
Pronounce:
Yirgan Shmidhoobuh
Wife:
Ulrike Krommer (since May 3, 1997)
Children:
Julia (since September 10, 1997), Leonie (since January 25, 2000)
Interests:
low-complexity art (see publications),
painting,
caricatures,
music composition,
the guitar,
theory of beauty,
science fiction written by scientists,
various physical activities.