Subject: Merry Xmas From: "Bill Howell. Hussar. Alberta. Canada" <> Date: Sat, 23 Dec 2017 18:16:40 -0700 To: "Delhi Belly. The Viceroy. ByeTown Bad Boys H3. Ottawa" Cc: Roger - Merry Xmas to you and Victoria, who must be really big by now!   I trust that you are always in hashing trouble, the way you like it.   I received news of Michael Jean's passing after a class act battle, which leaves a big hole for everyone, especially wife Vanessa and children (that I know about) ?Rory & Sadie?.    Post Vancouver sell-out, I trust that you were living like a millionaire but are now slowing down the spending a bit. By the way, in spite of their being tons of Ukrainians in Alberta, I haven't found any who are interested in discussing Ukrainian history (perhaps many that I meet are actually of Russian descent too?).  Worse, none are interested in a key Ukrainian role in the initial conceptualization of one of the most important advanced technologies today : Deep Learning neural networks (its Computational Intelligence (CI) - not AI!!!).  See below for a past email.  I've kind of given up on that bit of history, but I'll try again this spring at the Calgary Ukrainian festival if I get there. Cheers, and all the best, Bill Howell Volunteer firefighter, 2016-2017, Member of Hussar Lion's Club & Sundowners 1-587-707-2027     www.BillHowell.ca P.O. Box 299, Hussar, Alberta, T0J1S0 Mr. Bill Howell 1-587-707-2027     www.BillHowell.ca P.O. Box 299, Hussar, Alberta, T0J1S0 member - International Neural Network Society (INNS), IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE-CIS) IJCNN2017 Anchorage Publications Chair, mass emails, www.ijcnn.org WCCI2018 Rio de Janeiro : Publicity committee, http://www.ecomp.poli.br/~wcci2018/committees/ Retired: Science Research Manager (SE-REM-01) at Natural Resources Canada, CanmetMINING, Ottawa ******************** Soap opera details I've been fighting with computers all year - first on a project for my brother (Feb-Jul, petroleum reservoir engineering software system build), then a video presentation on Science, Technology, Engineering, Math] (STEM) for the Drumheller library (actually, it was way too high level for 8 to 12 year olds).  After a year's absence, I'm now re-starting a project on fundamental theoretical physics (Bill Lucas's "Universal Force"). Both my daughters live in Auckland :  Catherine founded a social media marketing company that is doing great, and Sarah moved from Singapore when she broke up with her Norwegian partner, and for now is working for Catherine on producing videos for marketing. I have coffee every morning with retired farmers and ranchers, and now better understand it when they always complain even when things are going great.  I've still got the same problems : eating and restaurants, but less issue with bars as I don't go so often anymore.  I'm just trying to start running again, although at a very modest level. ******************** 05Jul2017 21:06  Posting to :   https://www.facebook.com/SUSKNational I didn't use : http://ukrainiancalgary.blogspot.ca/ Modern recognition for a Ukrainian [mathematician, scientist] Alexey Grigorevich Ivakhnenko ?? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Grigorevich_Ivakhnenko While I certainly no expert, I have been casually following "Deep Learning Neural Networks" (DL-NNs) since ~2013, a few years after it began to have a serious impact on [computational intelligence, science, engineering, commercial implementations at Google, Facebook, Siemens, and others].  It is perhaps a major contributor (along with other techniques) to the current interest in AI (Artificial Intelligence, although it is actually Computational Intelligence), and the current rennaisance of neural network interest, which has occurred roughly every 20 years since approxmately the 1940s.  [Driverless cars, language translation, speech recognition, social media capabilities and marketing] are a few of the areas of impact.  For several years, a leading (giant) scientist in the area, Jeurgen Schmidhuber http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/ has repeatedly stated that the conceptual roots of Deep Learning (neural network (NN) based) can be traced back to at least the work of Ukrainian ?scientist Ivakhnenko in the 1960's : Ivakhnenko,  A.  G.  (1968).   The  group  method  of  data  handling  –  arrival  of  the  method  of  stochastic approximation. Soviet Automatic Control, 13(3):43–55. Ivakhnenko, A. G. (1971).  Polynomial theory of complex systems. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, (4):364–378. Ivakhnenko, A. G. (1995).  The review of problems solvable by algorithms of the group method of data handling (GMDH). Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis / Raspoznavaniye Obrazov I Analiz Izobrazhenii, 5:527–535. Ivakhnenko, A. G. and Lapa, V. G. (1965). Cybernetic Predicting Devices. CCM Information Corporation. Ivakhnenko, A. G., Lapa, V. G., and McDonough, R. N. (1967). Cybernetics and forecasting techniques. American Elsevier, NY Although I can't find the [blogs, interviews] mentioning the lack of recognition for Ivakhnenko (Juergen has stated that verbally in conference plenaries), here are couple of examples of Jeurgen's statements about Ivakhnenko's importance historically : J. Schmidhuber. Deep Learning in Neural Networks: An Overview. Neural Networks, Volume 61, January 2015, Pages 85-117 (DOI: 10.1016/j.neunet.2014.09.003) http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Q3Bc3BBjKFZVN Online version : http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/DeepLearning2July2014.pdf Overview : http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-overview.html https://plus.google.com/100849856540000067209 Juergen Schmidhuber - Machine Learning "... Who introduced the term “deep learning” to the field of Machine Learning (ML) and Neural Networks (NNs)? Just a few days ago we had an interesting discussion about this on the connectionists mailing list http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/connectionists Although Ivakhnenko had working, deep learning nets in the 1960s (still used in the new millennium), and Fukushima had them in the 1970s, and backpropagation also was invented back then, nobody called this “deep learning.”  ..." However, it seems that Ivakhnenko never has received recognition for his work, which did not really become a reality until decades later (work of Paul Werebos' "Ordered derivatives" (the simpler and incomplete version "backpropagation came in ~186 via three groups) and models dating back to 1974, Kuhino Fukashima's ?1981? "Neocognitron", Jeurgen Schmidhumer's 1991 "Long Short-Term Memory" (LSTM), and 2006-2012? popularisation by Yan LeCunn via simpler Convolutional Neural Networks, as well as Geoffrey Hinton) are some of the steps along the way (Schidhuber's review provides a wealth of information on this). But Ivakhnenko might be considered to be a giant as well. I am not going to pursue this issue myself, but I thought that someone within the Ukrainian community might be interested in doing the background confirmation of this story, find out if there is already an effort to recognize Ivakhnenko's contributions, and if not either do something about it, or find someone that will.  Who knows, it could be another inspiration for young Ukrainian [students, mathematicians, scientists, engineers].  Mr. Bill Howell   www.BillHowell.ca Hussar, Alberta member - International Neural Network Society (INNS), IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE-CIS) IJCNN2017 Anchorage Publications Chair, mass emails, www.ijcnn.org WCCI2018 Rio de Janiero : Publicity committee, http://www.ecomp.poli.br/~wcci2018/committees/ Retired: Science Research Manager (SE-REM-01) at Natural Resources Canada, CanmetMINING, Ottawa