b. 1947
Terrence J. Sejnowski is a computational neuroscientist and pioneer of connectionism at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He has made foundational contributions to artificial neural networks, learning algorithms, and the neuroscience of cognition, and has engaged in debates over whether empiricist connectionist models can account for language acquisition without innate grammatical structure.
Co-developed the Boltzmann machine with Geoffrey Hinton, a foundational probabilistic neural network model
Created NETtalk, an early neural network demonstrating learned text-to-speech conversion
Contributed to establishing backpropagation as the dominant neural network training algorithm
Engaged the nativist/empiricist debate in language acquisition through connectionist modeling of learnability
Authored 'The Deep Learning Revolution' (2018), a landmark account of modern AI's neuroscientific roots