[meow1032]

>You could fairly say that only a few of the prominent labs from the first neural-net boom lasted long enough to still be prominent labs now in the second neural-net boom (though even then there are several: Hinton, Bengio, Schmidhuber, LeCun, etc.)

I agree, I don't mean to imply that Hinton did all of the work on NN's, but he certainly contributed a lot to the field, even as the popularity waxed and waned.

Even if you just click on a few of the names in your link, you can see most of those authors submitted ~1-6 papers. Hinton, Bengio, and Jordan have submitted >50 each. I wouldn't say that NN's were exactly thought of as a joke before 2011, but from the people I talked to about them, they weren't considered very promising as practical statistical systems.