Bringing deep learning to life

Gaby Ecanow loves listening to music, but never considered writing her own until taking 6.S191 (Introduction to Deep Learning). By her second class, the second-year MIT student had composed an original Irish folk song with the help of a recurrent neural network, and was considering how to adapt the model to create her own Louis the Child-inspired dance beats. "It was cool," she says. "It didn't sound at all like a machine had made it." This year, 6.S191 kicked off as usual, with students spilling into the aisles of Stata Center's Kirsch Auditorium during Independent Activities Period (IAP).