1998
Dave Hampton and Caleb Chung create Furby, the first widely successful domestic robotic pet.28 Furby can respond to touch, sound and light and "learn" language over time, starting with its language, Furbish, but gradually "speaking" more English as it interacts with users. Its ability to mimic learning and engage with users makes it a precursor to more sophisticated social robots, blending robotics with entertainment for the first time in a consumer product.
Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio and their collaborators publish influential papers on neural networks' application to handwriting recognition.29 Their work focuses on using convolutional neural networks to optimize the backpropagation algorithm, making it more effective for training deep networks. By refining the backpropagation process and demonstrating the power of CNNs for image and pattern recognition, LeCun and Bengio's research set the stage for modern deep learning techniques used in a wide range of AI applications today.