creators

Jurgen Schmidhuber - LSTM co-creator, KAUST

Jurgen Schmidhuber co-created LSTM with Sepp Hochreiter in 1997. He is professor of computer science at KAUST and co-chair of its generative-AI centre.

Jürgen Schmidhuber (born 1963 in Munich) is a German computer scientist whose lab produced several techniques modern deep learning runs on. He took his diploma (1987), doctorate (1991) and habilitation (1993) at the Technical University of Munich, and became scientific director of the Swiss AI lab IDSIA in 1995. His best-known contribution is Long Short-Term Memory, the recurrent architecture published in 1997 with his student Sepp Hochreiter, which carried speech recognition and machine translation through the 2010s. He is also the field's most persistent archivist of precedence, arguing that ideas credited to others — adversarial networks, meta-learning, residual connections — appeared first in his group's work. He joined King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia in 2021 as director of its AI Initiative. KAUST's faculty page now gives his titles as professor of computer science and co-chair of the university's Center of Excellence for Generative AI, which Bernard Ghanem chairs. He keeps his Swiss base: his X profile lists Switzerland and Saudi Arabia, and his April 2026 ICLR invited talk was billed to IDSIA and KAUST.

Specialization

recurrent neural networks, deep learning, meta-learning, reinforcement learning

Country

Saudi Arabia