Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

people.idsia.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 105 posts

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#41

Post by matkoniecz »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #24

This whole comment section is full of absolutely unacceptable ad-hominem attacks on Schmidhuber, from people who most likely haven't even read any of the works in question and are certainly not showing any of the "intellectual curiosity" this site is supposed to be about. Anyone who cares about academic integrity should at least not attack someone complaining of plagiarism. That sort of attack is the academic equival…

> Anyone who cares about academic integrity should at least not attack someone complaining of plagiarism

What about cases when accusation was unreasonable and not matching reality?

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#42

Post by logicchains »

gillesjacobs wrote: post #7
gexaha wrote: post #4

I wonder what Schmidhuber colleagues think of all of this.

Within the field his name has become a punchline to joke about self-aggrandizing. But yeah, you honestly have to wonder what it is like day-to-day working with someone with this level of delusions of grandeur.

>But yeah, you honestly have to wonder what it is like day-to-day working with someone with this level of delusions of grandeur.

It's not delusions of grandeur; anyone with half a brain who read his early papers would see he clearly came up with the idea of a GAN well before Ian Goodfellow.

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#43

Post by KRAKRISMOTT »

logicchains wrote: post #38
throwup238 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel bad for him. He did get passed over of some deserved awards and recognition. But he reeks of resentment and thats never a good look. It's a terrible look. We're in the middle of one of the biggest gold rushes in tech history and he's wasting time complaining when he claims to be one of its pioneers? That effort is much better invested in building stuff but I suspect he's fallen into the classic PI trap of wr…

>atrophying his skills too much to do anything now that the industry is moving so quikcly. His recent papers are still cutting edge. He's already solved self-improving AI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.05780 , it just needs to be scaled up.

His students you mean, otherwise he would be first author. Academia is just like capitalism, with credits substituting for capital. The capital owner (laboratory head/professor) always gets a cut of everything published.

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#44

Post by logicchains »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #5

Reading the article and some of the links make me feel like the author Jürgen Schmidhuber is the academic version of the patent troll. It sounds like he published some theoretical musings back in 1990s without any real practical implementation that did anything useful and since then has run around accusing AI researchers who actually produced concrete research and techniques to get are actually in use today of plagia…

>It sounds like he published some theoretical musings back in 1990s without any real practical implementation

He published working models back then, the problem was compute power was very limited. In the past decade deep learning took off, people took his models, renamed then and ran them on vastly more powerful computers, to great success, then failed to cite him.

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#45

Post by cs702 »

Copying and pasting Urban Dictionary's definitions of "to schmidhuber"[a], "schmidhuber"[b] and "schmidhubered"[c]:

---

to schmidhuber

When you publicly claim that someone else's idea that is remotely resembling your own is stolen from you.

---

schmidhuber

1) To interject for a moment and explain how one's recent popular idea is a few transformations away from your 1991 paper.

2) To miraculously produce fifty years of relevant literature after someone claims to trace the origin of an idea in a particular work.

---

schmidhubered

Being "schmidhubered" looks something like this:

1) Invent something brilliant that no one cares about. Experience derision.

2) That thing becomes popular years later. Someone else is given credit for inventing it. That person appears in the New York Times and is declared smartest person alive.

3) Go on a campaign explaining the situation and how you are the rightful inventor and thus the rightful Smartest Person Alive.

4) Everyone accuses you of being a sore loser and no one takes you seriously.

5) A verb is named after you.

---

[a] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=to+schmidhub...

[b] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=schmidhuber

[c] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=schmidhubere...

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#46

Post by logicchains »

peterfirefly wrote: post #31
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #24

This whole comment section is full of absolutely unacceptable ad-hominem attacks on Schmidhuber, from people who most likely haven't even read any of the works in question and are certainly not showing any of the "intellectual curiosity" this site is supposed to be about. Anyone who cares about academic integrity should at least not attack someone complaining of plagiarism. That sort of attack is the academic equival…

I tried reading one of his papers that he claimed contained an important concept avant la lettre. It was unreadable and it required an almost Marxist torture of the text to make it confess (weakly and unconvincingly) that it contained anything remotely like the idea he claimed it did.

>It was unreadable

Which paper was that; I've always found his writing relatively clear. Are you sure it wasn't just the case that you didn't understand the paper?

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#48

Post by shrimpx »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #34
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Credit belongs to whoever actually makes it work. That is according to whom? Is it a rule you just came up with or accepted practice? And if it's accepted practice, in what community is it accepted practice? Because where I publish and review there's really no such rule and credit belongs to the people who deserve credit for the work they've done that was useful to others.

Basically ideas are a dime a dozen. Sure, your idea might be a good one, but how do we spot your grain of sand is special when it looks the same as the rest of the desert? Essentially having an idea isn't useful to others. Demonstrating that your idea has legs is useful to others. I don't have to deal with citing papers, but I once had to deal with people pitching me ideas, wanting me to sign an NDA, in exchange for…

> Basically ideas are a dime a dozen.

There's a spectrum of ideas, from groundbreaking to "dime a dozen". In tech startups, and in almost all of computer science, most ideas are a dime a dozen, and the value is in the execution.

But clearly, some ideas are groundbreaking. Einstein rightfully gets the credit for an on-paper hypothesis that wasn't proved until decades later via a chain of critical discoveries and experimental innovations by other people. It's legit to call it Einstin's relativity, and not Mossbauer/Hay's relativity.

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#49

Post by caddemon »

logicchains wrote: post #40
martopix wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a guy becomes famous almost exclusively for having a beef with someone else (and this someone else really doesn't need to beat any drum in order to be famous), then something is wrong. Basically these days this is what Schmidhuber is associated to. Which is kind of sad, really.

>If a guy becomes famous almost exclusively for having a beef with someone else He was famous well before that for having one of the best labs in Europe, and many key papers in early deep learning. He's only famous for the beef among people who aren't familiar with his earlier work and the huge contributions it made to the field.

It's hard not to think of the beef when you think of him now though, even if you already knew some of his work. To be clear I don't think that should take away from what he did accomplish, but it's like a Pavlovian association at this point to also have his behavior come to mind.

Re: Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit

#50

Post by refulgentis »

logicchains wrote: post #37
erostrate wrote: post #11

List of "famous" ML people not to waste time on: - Gary Marcus - Juergen Schmidhuber - Pedro Domingos - Max Tegmark - Eliezer Yudkowsky Some context for people unfamiliar with ML research: the author, Schmidhuber, is well known for claiming that he should get credit for many ML ideas. Most ML researchers think that: - He doesn't deserve the credit he claims, in most if not all cases. - There's a few cases where his p…

>Most ML researchers think that: He doesn't deserve the credit he claims, in most if not all cases. That deserves a source. Especially for "all cases"; I don't think anyone who understands machine learning could read some of his earlier papers and still think Ian Goodfellow invented GANs.

Frankly, I do, and it comes across as quibbling about categories and trying to define unnecessarily general taxonomic categories, as a reaction to positive reactions to other people.

ex. in the article: "Goodfellow eventually admitted that my PM is adversarial...but emphasized that it's not generative. However, [it] is both adversarial and generative (its generator contains probabilistic units)...It is actually a generalized version of GANs."

When you're at "actually, probabilities means generative, and actually you know what, even my initial claim was too specific: turns out its a generalized version of GANs", all in service of arguing a paper should have been cited in another paper, years after the other paper has been published, there's not much room for sympathy.

Post reply on HN