Milestone-Proposal:Theories on Neural Networks

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Docket #:2024-15

This proposal has been submitted for review.

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To the proposer’s knowledge, is this achievement subject to litigation? No

Is the achievement you are proposing more than 25 years old? Yes

Is the achievement you are proposing within IEEE’s designated fields as defined by IEEE Bylaw I-104.11, namely: Engineering, Computer Sciences and Information Technology, Physical Sciences, Biological and Medical Sciences, Mathematics, Technical Communications, Education, Management, and Law and Policy. Yes

Did the achievement provide a meaningful benefit for humanity? Yes

Was it of at least regional importance? Yes

Has an IEEE Organizational Unit agreed to pay for the milestone plaque(s)? Yes

Has the IEEE Section(s) in which the plaque(s) will be located agreed to arrange the dedication ceremony? Yes

Has the IEEE Section in which the milestone is located agreed to take responsibility for the plaque after it is dedicated? Yes

Has the owner of the site agreed to have it designated as an IEEE Milestone? Yes

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Year or range of years in which the achievement occurred:

1989

Title of the proposed milestone:

Theories on Neural Networks

Plaque citation summarizing the achievement and its significance; if personal name(s) are included, such name(s) must follow the achievement itself in the citation wording: Text absolutely limited by plaque dimensions to 70 words; 60 is preferable for aesthetic reasons.

From 1988 to 1996 at the Adaptive Systems Research Department at Bell Labs, Yann LeCun lead the development of a host of computational technologies that 25 years later formed the foundation of the Artificial Intelligence revolution of the early 21st century. These included the convolutional neural nets, and associated back propagation, regularization and pruning methods which were successfully applied to the world’s first handwritten letter and number recognition system.

200-250 word abstract describing the significance of the technical achievement being proposed, the person(s) involved, historical context, humanitarian and social impact, as well as any possible controversies the advocate might need to review.

By the middle of 1980s very basic notions of regularization, back propagation and the multi-scale averaging method known as convolution had been conceived by various researchers including a small group at the University of Toronto to imitate vision in biological systems. However, these methods typically required computational resources far beyond what was then available. After a brief postdoctoral position at Toronto, Yann LeCun joined Bell Labs, the world’s leading communication R&D center at the time. It was in this setting and under the guidance of Larry Jackel, that a 1st practical convolutional neural network was designed and implemented by LeCun and his collaborators (later named LeNet) for handwriting recognition. This was the 1st non-trivial classification system able to perform computer vision using the deep neural network (DNN) architecture. It is remarkable to note that almost all of the key computational components that are taken for granted in use of DNNs for computer vision today: convolution (for dimensionality reduction), regularization (to handle numerical stability), back propagation (for gradient-based learning) and pruning (to reduce the number of parameters in a DNN) were all incorporated in this first demonstration of computer vision, a cognitive task that up to that time had not been performed by any machine. Two and one half decades later, with the wide availability of powerful graphical processing units, these same collection of techniques initiated the AI revolution of the early 21st century.

IEEE technical societies and technical councils within whose fields of interest the Milestone proposal resides.

Computer, Computational Intelligence

In what IEEE section(s) does it reside?

North Jersey

IEEE Organizational Unit(s) which have agreed to sponsor the Milestone:

IEEE Organizational Unit(s) paying for milestone plaque(s):

Unit: North Jersey Section
Senior Officer Name: Hong Zhao

IEEE Organizational Unit(s) arranging the dedication ceremony:

Unit: North Jersey Section
Senior Officer Name: Hong Zhao

IEEE section(s) monitoring the plaque(s):

IEEE Section: North Jersey
IEEE Section Chair name: Hong Zhao

Milestone proposer(s):

Proposer name: Theodore Sizer
Proposer email: Proposer's email masked to public

Please note: your email address and contact information will be masked on the website for privacy reasons. Only IEEE History Center Staff will be able to view the email address.

Street address(es) and GPS coordinates in decimal form of the intended milestone plaque site(s):

40.684031,-74.401783

Describe briefly the intended site(s) of the milestone plaque(s). The intended site(s) must have a direct connection with the achievement (e.g. where developed, invented, tested, demonstrated, installed, or operated, etc.). A museum where a device or example of the technology is displayed, or the university where the inventor studied, are not, in themselves, sufficient connection for a milestone plaque.

Please give the address(es) of the plaque site(s) (GPS coordinates if you have them). Also please give the details of the mounting, i.e. on the outside of the building, in the ground floor entrance hall, on a plinth on the grounds, etc. If visitors to the plaque site will need to go through security, or make an appointment, please give the contact information visitors will need. Intention is to have the plaque just outside the main entrance to the Nokia Bell Labs facility in Murray Hill, NJ. It is both a corporate building and a Historic Site as other historical markers are already on site both inside and outside the building.

Are the original buildings extant?

Yes

Details of the plaque mounting:

Outside the building on a rock or other permanent structure.

How is the site protected/secured, and in what ways is it accessible to the public?

The Plaque will be prior to entering the building and thus visitors do not need to pass through security.

Who is the present owner of the site(s)?

Nokia America

What is the historical significance of the work (its technological, scientific, or social importance)? If personal names are included in citation, include detailed support at the end of this section preceded by "Justification for Inclusion of Name(s)". (see section 6 of Milestone Guidelines)

Artificial Intelligence, first described in Bell Labs in the 1940's was refined greatly by Yann LeCun and his collaborators at Bell Labs in the 1980's. This work has exploded in recent years driven by new methods, hardware capabilities, and new applications which today have had major societal impact.

What obstacles (technical, political, geographic) needed to be overcome?

Key computational components of AI were invented at Bell Labs during this time. These components remain fundamental building blocks for AI research and implementation today.

What features set this work apart from similar achievements?

This work is clearly the foundation of the AI revolution that is occuring today. This has been recognized in many forms, including the Turing Award awarded by ACM in 2018.

Why was the achievement successful and impactful?

Artificial Intelligence has emerged as a powerful tool in society able to provide benefit in myriad forms from creative writing, to image analysis, to computer code generation.

Supporting texts and citations to establish the dates, location, and importance of the achievement: Minimum of five (5), but as many as needed to support the milestone, such as patents, contemporary newspaper articles, journal articles, or chapters in scholarly books. 'Scholarly' is defined as peer-reviewed, with references, and published. You must supply the texts or excerpts themselves, not just the references. At least one of the references must be from a scholarly book or journal article. All supporting materials must be in English, or accompanied by an English translation.

ACM Turing Award Citation Optimal Brain Damage, Touretzky, David (Eds) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 2 (NIPS*89), Denver Co 1990 Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten Zip Code Recognition, Neural Computation, 1(4):541-551, Winter 1989 L. Jackel, B. Boser, H.-P. Graf, J. Denker, Y. LeCun, D. Henderson, O. Matan, R. Howard and H. Baird: VLSI Implementation of Electronic Neural Networks: and Example in Character Recognition, in IEEE (Eds), IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 320-322, Los Angeles, CA, November 1990 Une procédure d'apprentissage pour réseau a seuil asymmetrique (a Learning Scheme for Asymmetric Threshold Networks), Proceedings of Cognitiva 85, 599–604, Paris, France, 1985. B. Boser, E. Sackinger, J. Bromley, Y. LeCun and L. Jackel: An analog neural network processor with programmable topology, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 26(12):2017-2025, December 1991,

Supporting materials (supported formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, DOC): All supporting materials must be in English, or if not in English, accompanied by an English translation. You must supply the texts or excerpts themselves, not just the references. For documents that are copyright-encumbered, or which you do not have rights to post, email the documents themselves to ieee-history@ieee.org. Please see the Milestone Program Guidelines for more information.

Please email a jpeg or PDF a letter in English, or with English translation, from the site owner(s) giving permission to place IEEE milestone plaque on the property, and a letter (or forwarded email) from the appropriate Section Chair supporting the Milestone application to ieee-history@ieee.org with the subject line "Attention: Milestone Administrator." Note that there are multiple texts of the letter depending on whether an IEEE organizational unit other than the section will be paying for the plaque(s).

Please recommend reviewers by emailing their names and email addresses to ieee-history@ieee.org. Please include the docket number and brief title of your proposal in the subject line of all emails.