Seppo Ilmari Linnainmaa (born 28 September 1945) is aFinnishmathematician andcomputer scientist known for creating the modern version ofbackpropagation.
He was born inPori.[1] He received his MSc in 1970 and introduced a reverse mode ofautomatic differentiation in his MSc thesis.[2][3] In 1974 he obtained the first doctorate ever awarded in computer science at theUniversity of Helsinki.[4] In 1976, he became Assistant Professor. From 1984 to 1985 he was Visiting Professor at theUniversity of Maryland, USA. From 1986 to 1989 he was Chairman of the Finnish Artificial Intelligence Society. From 1989 to 2007, he was Research Professor at theVTT Technical Research Centre ofFinland. He retired in 2007.
Explicit, efficient errorbackpropagation in arbitrary, discrete, possibly sparsely connected,neural networks-like networks was first described in Linnainmaa's 1970 master's thesis,[2][5] albeit without reference to NNs,[6] when he introduced the reverse mode ofautomatic differentiation (AD), in order to efficiently compute thederivative of adifferentiablecomposite function that can be represented as agraph, by recursively applying thechain rule to the building blocks of the function.[4][2][5] Linnainmaa published it first, following Gerardi Ostrowski who had used it in the context of certain process models in chemical engineering some five years earlier, but didn't publish.
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