1942–2011, Cognitive psychologist
Also known as: David E. Rumelhart
David Everett Rumelhart was an American cognitive psychologist who, with James McClelland, edited the two-volume Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition (1986), the foundational text of modern connectionism. The PDP volumes brought together McClelland and Rumelhart's interactive-activation model of letter perception, Sejnowski and Hinton's work on Boltzmann machines, the backpropagation paper, and a comprehensive theoretical and empirical case for distributed neural-network models of cognition.
With Hinton and Ronald Williams he co-authored the 1986 Nature paper Learning Representations by Back-Propagating Errors, the paper that popularised backpropagation and triggered the neural-network revival of the late 1980s. The mathematical idea (the chain rule applied to a layered architecture) had been independently discovered by Werbos (1974), Parker (1985), LeCun (1985) and others; the Rumelhart–Hinton–Williams paper was the one the field read.
Rumelhart developed Pick's disease in 1998 and was forced to retire from Stanford. He died in 2011. The annual David E. Rumelhart Prize is awarded by the Cognitive Science Society for contributions to the theoretical foundations of cognition.
Related people: Geoffrey Hinton, James McClelland
Works cited in this book:
- Learning representations by back-propagating errors (1986) (with Geoffrey E. Hinton, Ronald J. Williams)
Discussed in:
- Chapter 9: Neural Networks, Neural Networks