Deep learning shows its thinking by explaining the reasoning behind its predictions

A Duke team trained a computer to identify up to 200 species of birds from just a photo. Given a photo of a mystery bird (top), the A.I. spits out heat maps showing which parts of the image are most similar to typical species features it has seen before It can take years of birdwatching experience to tell one species from the next. But using an artificial intelligence technique called deep learning, Duke University researchers have trained a computer to identify up to 200 species of birds from just a photo. The real innovation, however, is that the A.I. tool also shows its thinking, in a way that even someone who doesn't know a penguin from a puffin can understand. The team trained their deep neural network -- algorithms based on the way the brain works -- by feeding it 11,788 photos of 200 bird species to learn from, ranging from swimming ducks to hovering hummingbirds.