Deep Learning in Action (the less-math-more-apps version)

On Tuesday at Hochschule München, Fakultät für Informatik and Mathematik I again gave a guest lecture on Deep Learning (RPubs, github, pdf). This time, it was more about applications than about matrices, more about general understanding than about architecture, and just in general about getting a feel what deep learning is used for and why. (Deep reinforcement learning also made a short appearance in there. Reinforcement learning certainly is another topic to post and/or present about, another time…)

I’ve used a lot of different sources, so I’ve put them all at the end, to make the presentation more readable. (Not only have I used lots of different sources, I’ve also used a few sources a lot. In deep learning, I find myself citing the same sources over and over – be it for the concise explanations, the great visualizations, or the inspiring ideas. Mainly thinking of Chris Olah’s and Andrey Karpathy’s blogs here, of the Deep Learning book, and of several Stanford lecture notes.)

One thing that always gets lost when you publish a presentation are the demos. In this case, I had three demos:

• the classification task from ConvNetJS
• TensorFlow playground, and
• the convolution kernel in GIMP

The first two are great sites that allow you to demonstrate the very basics of neural networks directly in the browser: When do you need hidden layers? What role does the form of the dataset play? In what cases can adding a single neuron make a difference between failing at, or successfully solving, a task?
The third demo is just – I think – totally fun: Would you have known that you can play around with your own convolution kernels, just like that, in GIMP? 😉

Note: This was originally published on recurrent null.