Out in the Open: Free Software That Teaches Your Smartphone How to See

Pete Warden has been trying to teach computers to see since the 1990s. Now, thanks to the branch of artificial intelligence called deep learning, he's finally making some progress. Deep learning attempts to model the structure and behavior of the human brain to solve complex computer science problems. The field has been around since the 1980s, but there's been an explosion of interest in its techniques in the past few years as the cost of powerful computers has fallen. Google now uses deep learning inside several of its online services, and last year, it hired Geoffrey Hinton, the central figure in the movement.