Classifying old Japanese characters using CNN

Jiro's pick this week is CNN for Old Japanese Character Classification by one of my colleagues Akira Agata. Nowadays, I probably go many days without seeing a handwritten document. From computers, to smartphones, to TVs, to books, almost every character I see is a printed character. So it's refreshing to see a handwritten document from time to time. This demo by Akira uses deep learning (convolutional neural networks) to classify various handwritten Japanese characters.