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The Believers: Behind the Rise of Neural Nets

Posted by samzenpus on from the back-in-the-day dept.

An anonymous reader writes Deep learning is dominating the news these days, but it's quite possible the field could have died if not for a mysterious call that Geoff Hinton, now at Google, got one night in the 1980s: "You don't know me, but I know you," the mystery man said. "I work for the System Development Corporation. We want to fund long-range speculative research. We're particularly interested in research that either won't work or, if it does work, won't work for a long time. And I've been reading some of your papers." The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a readable profile of the minds behind neural nets, from Rosenblatt to Hassabis, told primarily through Hinton's career.

2 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. NSA by thhamm · · Score: 5, Funny

    "You don't know me, but I know you," the mystery man said.

    We call them "NSA" now.

  2. Re:Do they actually work well now? by CanarDuck · · Score: 5, Informative

    Last time I looked there was no application of ANNs which couldn't be solved more efficiently by other algorithms ... and the best ANNs used spiking neurons with Hebbian learning which are not amenable to efficient digital implementation.

    Is it possible that last time you checked was a long time ago? Deep neural networks are again all the rage now (i.e. huge teams working with them at Facebook and Google) because

    1. (1) They have resulted in a significant performance improvement over previously state-of-the-art algorithms in many application tasks,
    2. (2) Although they are computation-heavy, they are amenable to massive parallelization (modern computational power is probably the main reason why they have improved singificantly with respect to ANNs of the 80-90s, given that the main architecture itself has not changed a lot, except possibly for the "convolution" trick which effectively introduces hard-coded localization and spatial invariance).

    Check the wikipedia page for "convolutional neural networks" as well as other /. entries: http://slashdot.org/tag/deeple... , and from yesterday http://tech.slashdot.org/story... .