Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber has pioneered self-improving general problem solvers since 1987, and deep learning neural networks since 1991. The recurrent neural networks developed by his research groups at the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA (at the Università della Svizzera italiana and University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Italian Switzerland) and the Technical University of Munich were the first to win official international contests. They have revolutionised handwriting recognition, speech recognition, machine translation, image captioning and are now available to over a billion users through Google, Microsoft, IBM, Baidu and many other companies. DeepMind is heavily influenced by his lab's former students. His team's Deep Learners were the first to win object detection and image segmentation contests and achieved the world's first superhuman visual classification results, winning nine international competitions in machine learning and pattern recognition (more than any other team).