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Schmidhuber Traces First Modern CNN to 1988 Work by Wei Zhang

Jürgen Schmidhuber reignited the debate over deep learning history, tracing the first modern backprop-trained CNN to 1988 work by Wei Zhang and updating the record with further sources.

2026-08-13 ~ 2026-08-29 · 2 episodes · 6 posts

Episode 1 · Schmidhuber Traces First Modern CNN to 1988 Japan Paper (2026-08-13, 4 posts)

Jürgen Schmidhuber says the first modern backpropagation-trained CNN for vision was published in Japan in 1988 by Chinese researcher Wei Zhang and colleagues, predating the commonly accepted history.

Episode 2 · Schmidhuber Updates History of First Backprop CNN from 1988 (2026-08-28, 2 posts)

Jürgen Schmidhuber updated the history of CNNs, noting the first modern backpropagation-trained CNN was published in 1988 by Chinese researcher Wei Zhang et al. in Japan. The technology has since received FDA approval for mammography.