Neural-Network Technology Moves into the Mainstream News

The technology has been helping companies gain deep insight into customer purchasing patterns. While the technology is just now beginning to gain appeal, research to develop neural networks was started years ago by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and a firm founded by technology visionary Robert Hecht-Nielsen, whose company, HNC Software, was acquired last fall by Fair Isaac, a developer of statistics-based consumer and corporate credit score software. "Traditional fraud detection operates with a delay of months or years," Tammy Delatorre, a spokesperson for Fair Isaac, told TechNewsWorld. "While useful, this approach does little to prevent fraudsters from committing costly fraud schemes and then disappearing with the money." To solve this fraud problem and to help predict customer trends, large corporations have begun to deploy neural-network technology -- so-called because it is patterned after the human brain's own synapses.