[1] Graves earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Theoretical Physics from the University of Edinburgh[when?]

and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the Technical University of Munich supervised by Jürgen Schmidhuber at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research.

At the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research, Graves trained long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks by a novel method called connectionist temporal classification (CTC).

[5] This method outperformed traditional speech recognition models in certain applications.

[6] In 2009, his CTC-trained LSTM was the first recurrent neural network (RNN) to win pattern recognition contests, winning several competitions in connected handwriting recognition.