Why Deep Learning, and Why Now

Deep learning is all the rage today, as companies across industries seek to use advanced computational techniques to find useful information hidden across huge swaths of data. While the field of artificial intelligence is decades old, breakthroughs in the field of artificial neural networks are driving the explosion of deep learning. In the wake of World War II, the English mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turning penned his definition for true artificial intelligence. Dubbed the Turing Test, a conversational machine would have to convince a human that he was talking to another human. It took 60 years, but a computer finally passed the Turing Test back in 2014, when a chat bot developed by the University of Reading dubbed "Eugene" convinced 33% of the judges convened by the Royal Society in London that he was real.