Activist Post: Many people don’t realize that some of the most significant
technological breakthroughs in recent years, like voice and facial
recognition software, autonomous driving systems, and image recognition
software, have not actually been designed by humans, but by computers.
All of these advanced software programs have been the result of neural
networks, popularly referred to as “deep learning.”
Neural networks are modeled loosely after the human brain and learn
like them in similar ways by processing large amounts of data, along
with algorithms fed to the networks by programmers. A neural net is then
able to teach itself to perform tasks by analyzing the training
data. “You essentially have software writing software,” says Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of graphics processing leader Nvidia.
Research in the area of deep learning is advancing so quickly that neural networks are now able to
dream and can even communicate with each other
using inhuman cryptographic language indecipherable to humans and other
computers. The only drawback to the technology is that the networks
require a lot of memory and power to operate, but MIT associate
professor of electrical engineering and computer science Vivienne Sze
and her colleagues have been working on a solution that could enable the
powerful software to operate on cell phones..read more>>>...