Deep learning is a discipline within AI that uses algorithms mimicking the human brain. Deep learning algorithms use neural networks to learn a certain task. Neural networks consist of interconnected neurons that process data in both the human brain and computers.

Microscopic interpretation of stained smears is one of the most operator-dependent and time intensive activities in the clinical microbiology laboratory. Here, we investigated application of an automated image acquisition and convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approach for automated Gram stain classification. Using an automated microscopy platform, uncoverslipped slides were scanned with a 40x dry objective, generating images of sufficient resolution for interpretation. We collected 25,488 images from positive blood culture Gram stains prepared during routine clinical workup. These images were used to generate 100,213 crops containing Gram-positive cocci in clusters, Gram-positive cocci in chains/pairs, Gram-negative rods, or background (no cells).

Cambridge Consultants has demonstrated an artificial intelligence system that takes simple sketches and transforms them into artwork that look like something created by Vincent Van Gogh or other famous painters. The system, which is nicknamed Vincent for obvious reasons, serves as a deep-learning demonstration for the company, which recently showcased the AI's abilities on video. The system uses machine learning to understand artwork produced by famous painters since the renaissance, among them being Picasso and Van Gogh. Using this knowledge that it acquires, the system can take a sketch created by a human and apply art effects to it in an intelligent way, the end result being a colorful'painting' that looks like something created by a skilled human. Cambridge Consultants explains that it trained its AI with images of thousands of paintings, helping it learn things like contrast, textures, and color application.

This paper considers the problem of inverse reinforcement learning in zero-sum stochastic games when expert demonstrations are known to be not optimal. Compared to previous works that decouple agents in the game by assuming optimality in expert strategies, we introduce a new objective function that directly pits experts against Nash Equilibrium strategies, and we design an algorithm to solve for the reward function in the context of inverse reinforcement learning with deep neural networks as model approximations. In our setting the model and algorithm do not decouple by agent. In order to find Nash Equilibrium in large-scale games, we also propose an adversarial training algorithm for zero-sum stochastic games, and show the theoretical appeal of non-existence of local optima in its objective function. In our numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our Nash Equilibrium and inverse reinforcement learning algorithms address games that are not amenable to previous approaches using tabular representations. Moreover, with sub-optimal expert demonstrations our algorithms recover both reward functions and strategies with good quality.

Deep generative models are powerful tools that have produced impressive results in recent years. These advances have been for the most part empirically driven, making it essential that we use high quality evaluation metrics. In this paper, we provide new insights into the Inception Score, a recently proposed and widely used evaluation metric for generative models, and demonstrate that it fails to provide useful guidance when comparing models. We discuss both suboptimalities of the metric itself and issues with its application. Finally, we call for researchers to be more systematic and careful when evaluating and comparing generative models, as the advancement of the field depends upon it.

Artifical Neural Networks are a particular class of learning systems modeled after biological neural functions with an interesting penchant for Hebbian learning, that is "neurons that fire together, wire together". However, unlike their natural counterparts, artificial neural networks have a close and stringent coupling between the modules of neurons in the network. This coupling or locking imposes upon the network a strict and inflexible structure that prevent layers in the network from updating their weights until a full feed-forward and backward pass has occurred. Such a constraint though may have sufficed for a while, is now no longer feasible in the era of very-large-scale machine learning, coupled with the increased desire for parallelization of the learning process across multiple computing infrastructures. To solve this problem, synthetic gradients (SG) with decoupled neural interfaces (DNI) are introduced as a viable alternative to the backpropagation algorithm. This paper performs a speed benchmark to compare the speed and accuracy capabilities of SG-DNI as opposed to a standard neural interface using multilayer perceptron MLP. SG-DNI shows good promise, in that it not only captures the learning problem, it is also over 3-fold faster due to it asynchronous learning capabilities.

In this paper, we study the representational power of deep neural networks (DNN) that belong to the family of piecewise-linear (PWL) functions, based on PWL activation units such as rectifier or maxout. We investigate the complexity of such networks by studying the number of linear regions of the PWL function. Typically, a PWL function from a DNN can be seen as a large family of linear functions acting on millions of such regions. We directly build upon the work of Montufar et al. (2014), Montufar (2017) and Raghu et al. (2017) by refining the upper and lower bounds on the number of linear regions for rectified and maxout networks. In addition to achieving tighter bounds, we also develop a novel method to perform exact enumeration or counting of the number of linear regions with a mixed-integer linear formulation that maps the input space to output. We use this new capability to visualize how the number of linear regions change while training DNNs.

Self-paced learning and hard example mining re-weight training instances to improve learning accuracy. This paper presents two improved alternatives based on lightweight estimates of sample uncertainty in stochastic gradient descent (SGD): the variance in predicted probability of the correct class across iterations of mini-batch SGD, and the proximity of the correct class probability to the decision threshold. Extensive experimental results on six datasets show that our methods reliably improve accuracy in various network architectures, including additional gains on top of other popular training techniques, such as residual learning, momentum, ADAM, batch normalization, dropout, and distillation.

Massive amount of electronic medical records accumulating from patients and populations motivates clinicians and data scientists to collaborate for the advanced analytics to extract knowledge that is essential to address the extensive personalized insights needed for patients, clinicians, providers, scientists, and health policy makers. In this paper, we propose a new predictive approach based on feature representation using deep feature learning and word embedding techniques. Our method uses different deep architectures for feature representation in higher-level abstraction to obtain effective and more robust features from EMRs, and then build prediction models on the top of them. Our approach is particularly useful when the unlabeled data is abundant whereas labeled one is scarce. We investigate the performance of representation learning through a supervised approach. First, we apply our method on a small dataset related to a specific precision medicine problem, which focuses on prediction of left ventricular mass indexed to body surface area (LVMI) as an indicator of heart damage risk in a vulnerable demographic subgroup (African-Americans). Then we use two large datasets from eICU collaborative research database to predict the length of stay in Cardiac-ICU and Neuro-ICU based on high dimensional features. Finally we provide a comparative study and show that our predictive approach leads to better results in comparison with others.

I haven't taken this specific Udacity course on deep learning. But, I have completed their Nanodegree for the self-driving cars that covered a decent amount of deep learning material. I won't be surprised if they borrow some of the contents from there as well. Udacity offers high quality lectures and related projects. Their content is usually ver well organized and they are constantly improving.