Uncle Sam Wants Your Deep Neural Networks

Companies like Google and Facebook use the technology to do things like identify faces in online images, recognize commands spoken into smartphones and translate one language into another. But the possibilities extend well beyond smartphone apps and other online services. Earlier this year, Kaggle ran a $1 million contest to build algorithms capable of identifying signs of lung cancer in CT scans, helping to fuel a larger effort to apply neural networks to health care. Now, the hope is that neural networks can also help automated systems read body scans with greater accuracy, so checkpoint workers can spend less time pulling passengers aside and patting them down. "We started by trying to figure out what was a dog and what was a cat," said Goldbloom, referring to the growing community of companies, academics and other researchers working with neural networks.