Deep Learning: New kid on the supervised machine learning block

In the second instalment of this blog, we introduced machine learning as a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) that is concerned with methods and algorithms that allow machines to improve themselves and to learn from the past. Machine learning is often concerned with making so-called "supervised predictions," or learning from a training set of historical data where objects or outcomes are known and are labelled. Once trained, our machine or "intelligent agent" is enabled to differentiate between, say, a cat and a mat. The currently much-hyped "deep learning" is shorthand for the application of many-layered artificial neural networks (ANNs) to machine learning. An ANN is a computational model inspired by the way the human brain works.