What are convolutional neural networks (CNN)?

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. Since the 1950s, the early days of artificial intelligence, computer scientists have been trying to build computers that can make sense of visual data. In the ensuing decades, the field, which has become known as computer vision, saw incremental advances. In 2012, computer vision took a quantum leap when a group of researchers from the University of Toronto developed an AI model that surpassed the best image recognition algorithms by a large margin. The AI system, which became known as AlexNet (named after its main creator, Alex Krizhevsky), won the 2012 ImageNet computer vision contest with an amazing 85 percent accuracy.