Patrick Winston Explains Deep Learning – Rodney Brooks

Patrick Winston is one of the greatest teachers at M.I.T., and for 27 years was Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (which later became part of CSAIL). Patrick teaches 6.034, the undergraduate introduction to AI at M.I.T. and a recent set of his lectures is available as videos. I want to point people to lectures 12a and 12b (linked individually below). In these two lectures he goes from zero to a full explanation of deep learning, how it works, how nets are trained, what are the interesting problems, what are the limitations, and what were the key breakthrough ideas that took 25 years of hard thinking by the inventors of deep learning to discover. The only prerequisite is understanding differential calculus.