This paper proposes a framework for the biological learning mechanism as a general learning system. The proposal is as follows. The bursting and tonic modes of firing patterns found in many neuron types in the brain correspond to two separate modes of information processing, with one mode resulting in awareness, and another mode being subliminal. In such a coding scheme, a neuron in bursting state codes for the highest level of perceptual abstraction representing a pattern of sensory stimuli, or volitional abstraction representing a pattern of muscle contraction sequences. Within the 50-250 ms minimum integration time of experience, the bursting neurons form synchrony ensembles to allow for binding of related percepts. The degree which different bursting neurons can be merged into the same synchrony ensemble depends on the underlying cortical connections that represent the degree of perceptual similarity. These synchrony ensembles compete for selective attention to remain active. The dominant synchrony ensemble triggers episodic memory recall in the hippocampus, while forming new episodic memory with current sensory stimuli, resulting in a stream of thoughts. Neuromodulation modulates both top-down selection of synchrony ensembles, and memory formation. Episodic memory stored in the hippocampus is transferred to semantic and procedural memory in the cortex during rapid eye movement sleep, by updating cortical neuron synaptic weights with spike timing dependent plasticity. With the update of synaptic weights, new neurons become bursting while previous bursting neurons become tonic, allowing bursting neurons to move up to a higher level of perceptual abstraction. Finally, the proposed learning mechanism is compared with the back-propagation algorithm used in deep neural networks, and a proposal of how the credit assignment problem can be addressed by the current proposal is presented.

Whether you want to build algorithms or build a company, deeplearning.ai's Deep Learning is a superpower. With it you can make a computer see, synthesize novel art, translate languages, render a medical diagnosis, or build pieces of a car that can drive itself. If that isn't a superpower, I don't know what is. Head to our forums to ask questions, share projects, and connect with the deeplearning.ai

Perhaps China's biggest advantage is the sheer quantity of its data. Tencent's WeChat platform alone has over 889 million daily active users. Chinese e-commerce purchases are almost double U.S. totals. But China's data advantage involves more than just quantity. As China witnesses an explosion of O2O (online-to-offline) startups, their data is creating a new intelligence layer unparalleled in the West.

I truly believe that artificial intelligence (AI) will shape our future and will bring tremendous impact and applications in industries such as health and agriculture. One of the things that I aim to achieve with dair.ai is to discuss interesting open-source AI technologies that help to address important problems such as medical diagnosis and personalized learning. One of the tools that have caught my attention this week is MedicalTorch (developed by Christian S. Perone), which is an open-source medical imaging analysis tool built on top of PyTorch. It contains a set of loaders, pre-processors and utility functions to efficiently and easily analyze medical images such as those acquired from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. In this post, I will summarize some of the functionalities offered by the medicaltorch library and how it can be used to conduct medical imaging analysis. Specifically, this will be a tutorial on how to perform spinal cord gray matter segmentation using a technique based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs).

Enterprise AI: An applications perspective takes a use case driven approach to understanding the deployment of AI in the Enterprise. Designed for strategists and developers, the book provides a simple and practical roadmap based on application use cases for AI in Enterprises. The authors (Ajit Jaokar and Cheuk Ting Ho) are data scientists and AI researchers who have deployed AI applications for Enterprise domains. The book is used as a reference for Ajit and Cheuk's new course on Implementing Enterprise AI. The term'Enterprise' can be understood in terms of Enterprise workflows.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming ever more powerful. Consulting firm PwC estimates that AI could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy in 2030, more than the combined GDP of China and India today. The technology will soon be omnipresent--from household appliances to our financial, law and justice systems. That is why we should be very worried about the dark side of AI. And this is not about devilishly powerful AIs making humans slaves, as depicted in science fiction.

For most businesses, machine learning seems close to rocket science, appearing expensive and talent demanding. And, if you're aiming at building another Netflix recommendation system, it really is. But the trend of making everything-as-a-service has affected this sophisticated sphere, too. You can jump-start an ML initiative without much investment, which would be the right move if you are new to data science and just want to grab the low hanging fruit. One of ML's most inspiring stories is the one about a Japanese farmer who decided to sort cucumbers automatically to help his parents with this painstaking operation. Unlike the stories that abound about large enterprises, the guy had neither expertise in machine learning, nor a big budget. But he did manage to get familiar with TensorFlow and employed deep learning to recognize different classes of cucumbers. By using machine learning cloud services, you can start building your first working models, yielding valuable insights from predictions with a relatively small team. We've already discussed machine learning strategy. Now let's have a look at the best machine learning platforms on the market and consider some of the infrastructural decisions to be made.

It has been always difficult to consume TensorFlow or ONNX models without the help of tools like TensorFlow Serving or gRPC and all the fun that comes with protocol buffers. Hosting deep learning models to be consumed using REST was very hard although this is probably the most common approach application developers would start with. Microsoft has recently released Azure Machine Learning service which comes with heaps of features to facilitate development and deployment of machine learning models. One of those features is hosting ONNX models in docker containers to be consumed using REST. In this post, we go through an end to end workflow of hosting a sample ONNX model and consuming it from a .NET application.

As you plan your agenda, artificial intelligence (AI) is undoubtedly a hot topic on your list. This year we have a lot of great technical content on AI, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL)--with over 200 breakout sessions, hands-on workshops, deep-dive chalk talks, and more. You'll hear success stories about machine learning on AWS firsthand from customers and partners such as Sony, Moody's, NFL, Intuit, 21st Century Fox, Toyota, and more. This year's re:Invent also includes the AI Summit, where thought leaders in the academic community will share their perspectives on the future of AI. Here are a few highlights of this year's lineup from the re:Invent session catalog to help you plan your event agenda.