The leading European conference on machine learning and data mining, ECLM PKDD (European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases), awards this year’s Test of Time Award to Dong-Hyun Lee, Saizheng Zhang, Asja Fischer and Yoshua Bengio.

In their paper titled “Difference Target Propagation” , published in 2015, they explored a novel approach for a biologically plausible training of neural networks and introduced the idea of “target propagation” as a possible alternative to the commonly used method of backpropagation. The ECLM PKDD’s Test of Time Award honours this paper’s noticeable and lasting impact on research in the field of neural network training.