More on CNN history: people.idsia.ch/~juergen/who… Why did "modern" CNNs emerge in Japan 1979-1988 (Fukushima's 1979 CNN architecture → Zhang et al.'s 1988 backpropagation-trained CNN)? Let's look back at the 1980s. Back then, Japan was the envy of the world. Before the 1990 crash, the Tokyo stock market was the world's largest, and the world's 6 most valuable public companies were all Japanese. So were the world's richest business men. According to the real estate market, tiny Japan was 4 times more valuable than the much bigger US. The central square mile of Tokyo had the value of California. Japan had far more robots than any other country, and by far the most expensive AI project: the 5th Generation Project. Interestingly, this project had little to do with neural networks; it was mostly about logic programming and expert systems. So Fukushima and colleagues were outsiders back then. But at least there was sufficient funding in Japan, even for such unpopular types of blue skies research. Today, the rest of the world can be thankful for that. See also youtube.com/watch?v=ysOw6lNW…