Cell Phones Are About To Become More Powerful Than You Could Imagine

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>>>...