Textbook of AI

1947–, Computational neuroscientist

Also known as: Terrence J. Sejnowski

Terrence Joseph Sejnowski is an American computational neuroscientist who, with Geoffrey Hinton, invented the Boltzmann machine (1985), a stochastic recurrent neural network with a symmetric weight matrix and a learning algorithm based on contrasting the network's free-running and clamped statistics. With Charles Rosenberg he wrote NETtalk (1987), a feed-forward network trained by backpropagation that learned to read English text aloud, a famous early demonstration that distributed neural networks could solve a non-trivial language task.

Sejnowski has spent much of his career at the Salk Institute, where he founded the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory. He co-founded Neural Computation, the leading journal of the field, and the annual NeurIPS conference (originally NIPS). His 2018 popular book The Deep Learning Revolution gives an insider's history of the field.