AFAIK, deep learning became popular in 2012 with the victory of ImageNet Competition - Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2012 where winners of this contest actually used deep learning techniques for optimizing the solution for object recognition.
Who first coined the term deep learning? Is there any published research paper that first used that term?
The term was introduced to the machine learning and computer science community by Rina Dechter in Learning While Searching in Constraint-Satisfaction-Problems (1986) [1], where she writes
Discovering all minimal conflict-sets amounts to acquiring all the possible information out of a dead-end. Yet, such deep learning may require considerable amount of work.
When deep learning is used in conjunction with restricting the level of learning we get deep first-order learning (identifying minimal conflict sets of size 1) and deep second-order learning (i.e. identifying minimal conflict-sets of sizes 1 and 2).
Our experiments (implemented in LISP on a Symbolits LISP Machine) show that in most cases both performance measures improve as we move from shallow learning to deep learning and from first-order to second order.
However, note that the term deep learning was used before 1986 in other contexts, for example, in [2]. Moreover, note that Rina Dechter did not use the term in the context of neural networks, which was probably used later.
