Musings on Deep Learning -- Global Silicon Valley

Machine learning, and principally deep learning, is an area of intense interest in computer science today. Tech giants including (but certainly not limited to) Google, Facebook, Baidu, IBM, Microsoft are spending an enormous amount of money and effort to hire the best machine learning researchers. Deep learning has outperformed traditional computer vision (CV) technology in recent years. In the 2010 ImageNet Challenge, the best traditional CV algorithm had an error rate of 28.2% which meant that it got about 72 out of 100 images correct. In 2011, the best algorithm clocked in at 25.8% error rate.