READER FEEDBACK
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UC San Diego Magazine published this photo from the 1980s in the fall 2023 issue and asked if any classmates were out there .
Dave Rumelhart
What a pleasant surprise to see a picture from my physics class . I ’ m one of the classmates in the photo — I ’ m in the back row third from the left . The photo just might have enough resolution to show that the student in the middle of the last row has Maxwell ’ s Equations knit into his sweater . — Karin Robertson ’ 80 , MS ’ 83
DEAR EDITOR ,
I got the recent UC San Diego Magazine and jumped to Sara Bock ’ s AI story (“ The Future of AI is Now ,” Fall ’ 23 ) and enjoyed most of it , but I want to ( as gently as possible ) correct a critical misconception .
I was a PhD student in cognitive psychology at UC San Diego , and my thesis advisor was Dave Rumelhart . He was a brilliant man who made fundamental contributions to what we now call deep learning and neural networks , but he tragically died in his prime of a degenerative brain disease .
For example , he was the first researcher to use backpropagation to adjust the weights in neural networks so they could learn . Along with his collaborator Jay McClelland , Rumelhart wrote two books on parallel distributed processing ( PDP ) that were the “ bibles ” that everyone learned from in the 1980s and 1990s . ( Back then we said “ PDP ” where we ’ d say “ neural networks ” today ).
Geoff Hinton was one of Rumelhart ’ s postdocs in the early 1980s . I know and respect Hinton , but each time I hear him described as the “ godfather of AI ,” I cringe a bit because it reveals an ignorance about his work with Rumelhart that pains me greatly .
I am very close to this issue because in 2000 , I created ( and funded ) an annual award in the Cognitive Science Society called the Rumelhart Prize . This is the highest honor in the field . The prize selection committee chose Hinton as the first recipient because McClelland , who collaborated with Rumelhart much earlier and for much longer than Hinton did , was ineligible as the head of the selection committee . McClelland received the award as soon as he left the committee several years later .
Please , let ’ s not overlook the seminal contributions of Rumelhart to AI . — Bob Glushko , MA ’ 76 , PhD ’ 79 , is an adjunct full professor of cognitive science at UC Berkeley
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UC SAN DIEGO MAGAZINE 07