Deep Learning Aims to Upgrade Your Smartphone's Brain

The advertising world loves big, shiny, techy things. Agency and client ears perk right up when they hear about virtual reality kiosks, gadget-filled activations and holograms of dead rock stars. But then there are the tech innovations that sound a bit, or a lot, less sexy. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that essentially teaches computers to find patterns in sounds, images and other data. And while that may not seem like much fun to your average social marketer or copywriter, the tech giants--the Facebooks, Apples, Googles, Netflixes, Microsofts and Baidus of the world--are investing massive sums of money in it.