Pattern recognition

I helped work on a thing last weekend that I can't write about, yet, and then last week I found my way to San Jose for Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference, and fine, all right, OK, I'm convinced: Now that the smartphone boom is plateauing, AI/deep learning is the new coal face of technology -- and, at least for now, Nvidia bestrides it like many parallel colossi. I use the metaphor "coal face" advisedly. It's the place where advances are being made, where the most value is being created … but it's also a messy business, often with little visibility, with many ways to go terribly wrong. Neural networks are still more applied science than they are engineering, although it's beginning to move along that spectrum. The Nvidia GPU conference featured a sizable zone of scientific posters exploring the cutting edge of GPU usage, something you don't see at a lot of tech conferences.