21/08/2026
HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH IN FINLAND
Niia Junnila has finished an interesting thesis, first on the history of AI in Finland:
Niia Junnila: “Artificial intelligence is to be what we make of it” : how American and Finnish artificial intelligence communities viewed the future prospects for artificial intelligence between the years 1980 and 1999. Master’s Thesis, University of Oulu, 2026.
https://oulurepo.oulu.fi/handle/10024/64644
She interviewed during her research me, Eero Hyvönen, and professor Matti Pietikäinen as AI activists of the previous “AI summer” in the 1980s.
The interview brough back some memories from the 80s and 90s. I had the pleasure to be one of the organizers of the First Finnish AI Symposium (STeP) [1] in 1984 along with Jouko Seppänen and Markku Syrjänen, at the Helsinki University of Technology (TKK), today Aalto University. AI was a hot topic then, also on a political level like today, with the new idea of knowledge-based systems. This event started the series of organizing bi-annual STeP-conferences that constituted later arguably the longest series of computer science conferences in Finland up to 2010. Nokia Data was starting their AI businesses in 1984 related to the new generation of AI computers, Lisp-machines, and guaranteed the financial outcome of organizing STeP 1984. Back then I was hired from TKK as a part-time “Lisp evangelist” consultant by Nokia Data. Lisp was used widely in AI programming and there was finally a specific moment in the Finnish state budget for buying expensive Lisp machines in the universities. However, financial support from Nokia was not needed as the conference was very successful, attended by lots of researchers, and therefore very profitable.
STeP 1984 turned out to become a kind of starting point for AI research in Finland, although the idea of AI was invented already in the 40s and 50s in UK and the US, and there had been some interest in AI in Finland by individual researchers earlier. In particular, STeP 1984 contributed to establishing the Finnish AI Society (FAIS) (https://stes.fi) when organizing STeP 1986 – the surplus of STeP 1984 could now be used for organizing the next conference without financial concerns. The first chair of FAIS was research professor Seppo Linnainmaa. An interesting piece of history is that he actually invented the back propagation algorithm before Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton. This has been acknowledged later also by Geoffrey Hinton but the work in Finland was not widely known as it took place in a setting different from machine learning (managing rounding errors). The most famous Finnish researchers related to AI at that time included professors of formal logic, especially Jaakko Hintikka, the father of epistemic logic, and Georg von Wright famous in AI due to his deontic logic. Research on symbolic logic was then central in AI research. Professor Teuvo Kohonen, the famous neural network researcher from the subsymbolic side of AI and inventor of, e.g., Self-Organizing Maps (SOM), did not consider himself as an AI researcher initially, but later on presented also in FAIS conferences. Merging the two approaches to AI, symbolic and subsymbolic, into neuro-symbolic AI to mitigate their challenges, such as the knowledge acquisition bottleneck on the symbolic side and hallucinations on the sub-symbolic side, is a hot research topic today.
With other AI activists, also I started to participate in FAIS activities, first as a board member and later as chair. The activities in the 80s and 90s were very interdisciplinary and involved researchers from various research fields, including linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, music, art, and so on. Several seminars were organized by FAIS on topics such as intellectual history, philosophy, artificial life, and cognitive science in addition to more computational topics, such as object-oriented modeling and neural networks. We even organized with URSA Astronomical Society a seminar in Heureka Science Center on extraterrestrial life and how it could be identified. Proceedings of FAIS seminars were published as books in the FAIS publication series. FAIS also published the printed magazine “Arpakannus” on a regular basis. It was an important communication channel for community building because in the 80s and 90s the WWW was not really available and emails were not commonly in use.
Arpakannus (cf. the image attached) actually means a Lappish drum, arguably the first “computer” or “expert system” used in Finland and beyond [2]. Arpakannus drumhead (“screen”) was painted with symbols and was used by a shaman (“computer wizard”) by setting a piece of bone (“cursor”) on top it. When drumming (“computing”), the cursor moved from symbol to symbol and could answer questions and tell the future. It was clearly an expert system!
We therefore selected arpakannus as the logo for the first STeP 1984 conference. The logo was designed by artist Elisa Oesch based on an original drumhead pattern [3] but by adding there also a new contemporary symbol, a microchip. The STeP-1984 logo was later selected as the logo of the FAIS, too.
Arpakannus has also been proposed as one interpretation of the “Sampo” [4], the mythical artifact of the national Finnish epic Kalevala that gives its owner riches and good fortune. It is a bit like the ring in J. R. R. Tolkien’s (1892-1973) fantasy novel the Lord of the Rings; Tolkien was actually a fan of Kalevala. Kalevala, STeP 1984, and the interdisciplinary activities of FAIS still inspire our current research at the Aalto University and University of Helsinki on Digital Humanities and the Sampo model and series of systems [5] that are in use on the Semantic Web in Finland and beyond.
But this is part of later AI history of the 2000s in Finland, perhaps to be studied in Niia Junnila’s further research or by some other historians later.
[1] Eero Hyvönen, Jouko Seppänen, and Markku Syrjänen, Eds.: STeP-84 Symposium papers – Finnish Artificial Intelligence Symposium – Suomen tekoälytutkimuksen päivät, Otaniemi, Espoo, Finland: Tietojenkäsittelytieteen seura, 1984.
[2] Jouko Seppänen, “Arpakannus – muinaissuomalaista tietotekniikkaa,” Tekniikan Waiheita, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 4–8, Jun. 1985. https//journal.fi/tekniikanwaiheita/article/view/153733.
[3] Ernst Manker, Die Lappische Zaubertrommel, II. Die Trommel als Urkunde Geistigen Lebens. Almqvist & Wiksell, Uppsala, Sweden, 1950.
[4] Juha Hurme: Sampo. SKS Kirjat, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2025.
[5] Eero Hyvönen: Digital Humanities on the Semantic Web: Sampo Model and Portal Series. Semantic Web, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 729-744, 2023. https://doi.org/10.3233/SW-223034 Links, publications, and videos about all Sampos are available at: https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/applications/sampo/
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