Machine Learning is Fun! Part 3: Deep Learning and Convolutional Neural Networks

You might have seen this famous xkcd comic before. The goof is based on the idea that any 3-year-old child can recognize a photo of a bird, but figuring out how to make a computer recognize objects has puzzled the very best computer scientists for over 50 years. In the last few years, we've finally found a good approach to object recognition using deep convolutional neural networks. That sounds like a a bunch of made up words from a William Gibson Sci-Fi novel, but the ideas are totally understandable if you break them down one by one. So let's do it -- let's write a program that can recognize birds!