Year in Review: Deep Learning Breakthoughts 2016

The American elections have been a hot topic in the office as we contemplate expanding our presence to the US. Since its debut in March, we have been entertained by the senseless tweets of DeepDrumpf, a Twitter bot created by Bradley Hayes, a postdoc at MIT. DeepDrumpf was trained on a few hours worth of transcripts of victory speeches and debates from the president elect using deep learning techniques. The tweets were constructed character by character and inspired by recurrent neural network models that had been previously employed to mimic Shakespearean speech. Although not the most sophisticated use of deep learning that we've seen, we must hand it to him for originality and capturing the zeitgeist.