Neural networks and deep learning

Neural networks are at the very core of deep learning. They are versatile, powerful, and scalable, making them ideal to tackle large and highly complex Machine Learning tasks, such as classifying billions of images (e.g., Google Images), powering speech recognition services (e.g., Apple’s Siri), recommending the best videos to watch to hundreds of millions of users every day (e.g., YouTube), or learning to beat the world champion at the game of Go by examining millions of past games and then playing against itself (DeepMind’s AlphaGo).

This lesson introduces artificial neural networks, starting with a quick tour of the very first ANN architectures, then covering topics such as training neural nets, recurrent neural networks, and reinforcement learning. This lesson will clarify what neural networks are and why you may want to use them.