Deep Learning in a Nutshell: Core Concepts

This post is the first in a series I'll be writing for Parallel Forall that aims to provide an intuitive and gentle introduction to deep learning. It covers the most important deep learning concepts and aims to provide an understanding of each concept rather than its mathematical and theoretical details. While the mathematical terminology is sometimes necessary and can further understanding, these posts use analogies and images whenever possible to provide easily digestible bits comprising an intuitive overview of the field of deep learning. I wrote this series in a glossary style so it can also be used as a reference for deep learning concepts. Part 1 focuses on introducing the main concepts of deep learning. Part 2 provides historical background and delves into the training procedures, algorithms and practical tricks that are used in training for deep learning. Part 3 covers sequence learning, including recurrent neural networks, LSTMs, and encoder-decoder systems for neural machine translation.