Big data getting deeper

Building a truly intelligent machine has been the holy grail of computer science since its very beginning. One of the first ideas of how to achieve this, born not long after the dawn of artificial intelligence itself, was to simulate a human brain. Modelling the network of brain neurons has led to as many disappointments as breakthroughs over its fascinating decades-long history. Today, with massive amounts of data and computational power easily available, this old idea, rebranded as "deep learning," is once again seducing thinkers, visionaries and practitioners all over the world, promising real artificial intelligence Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are a comparatively old family of artificial intelligence techniques, dating back to the 1950s. They are in fact one of the very first attempts at constructing an intelligent algorithm, which would be able to learn from experience without being explicitly told how to make decisions.