PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Jürgen Schmidhuber

Jürgen Schmidhuber is a KAUST computer-science professor and co-chair of its Center of Excellence for Generative AI. His research career began at the Technical University of Munich and continued at IDSIA in Switzerland. With Sepp Hochreiter, he published Long Short-Term Memory in 1997, a neural-network method for using information across a sequence. Felix Gers, Schmidhuber, and Fred Cummins later added the forget gate. Applications such as Google voice search used LSTM through their own engineering teams. Schmidhuber also worked at the University of Lugano and co-founded NNAISENSE; his startup chief-scientist role ended in 2022. He moved to KAUST in 2021. His public writing argues about research attribution, including the 2024 Nobel Prize.

Now at
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
Works
685
Citations
186,124
h-index
89

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.

Photo of Jürgen Schmidhuber

Timeline

  1. Through 1992

    Munich research

    Schmidhuber studies computing and mathematics and completes doctoral work on neural networks.

  2. 1995

    IDSIA

    He becomes scientific director at the Swiss research institute.

  3. 1997–2000

    LSTM and the forget gate

    Hochreiter and Schmidhuber publish LSTM; Gers, Schmidhuber, and Cummins add a forget gate.

  4. 2009–2015

    Academic and applied work

    University and company work continue; Google describes LSTM use in voice search through its own team.

  5. 2021 and current roles

    KAUST

    Schmidhuber moves to KAUST, where he is a professor and center co-chair.

  6. 2024–2025

    Attribution arguments

    He publishes his response to the physics Nobel Prize, with claims requiring separate assessment.

Sources and credits

Photo: ITU/R.Farrell. License: CC BY 2.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.

  1. KAUST: current faculty profile kaust.edu.sa. Checked 10 October 2026.
  2. Schmidhuber: curriculum vitae people.idsia.ch. Checked 10 October 2026.
  3. History compression: 1992 paper, author-hosted text people.idsia.ch. Checked 10 October 2026.
  4. Hochreiter and Schmidhuber: Long Short-Term Memory, 1997 direct.mit.edu. Checked 10 October 2026.
  5. Hochreiter and Schmidhuber: LSTM conference paper and method people.idsia.ch. Checked 10 October 2026.
  6. Gers, Schmidhuber and Cummins: Learning to forget, 2000 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Checked 10 October 2026.
  7. Google Speech Team: voice search, 24 September 2015 research.google. Checked 10 October 2026.
  8. KAUST appointment announcement, 8 September 2021 kaust.edu.sa. Checked 10 October 2026.
  9. Schmidhuber’s response to the 2024 physics Nobel Prize people.idsia.ch. Checked 10 October 2026.