Deep Learning Summit San Francisco 2015
San Francisco

A computer vision company called Orbeus has just launched a photo gallery replacement app for iOS users, PhotoTime, which uses image and facial recognition technologies to allow users to search for photos based on who’s in them, what the photo is of, or where it was taken.

Deep learning and artificial intelligence are continuing to gain traction as enterprises and businesses are starting to realize the value of these technologies. The expanded audience for the conference demonstrated this momentum, with attendees from the likes of Google, Baidu, Twitter, Pinterest and many other tech and business giants.

Ian Goodfellow is a Senior Research Scientist on the Google Brain team. He studies new methods for improving neural networks. Recent publications include: Adversarial Autoencoders; Net2Net: Accelerating Learning via Knowledge Transfer; and Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples.

If you ask, Alexa can tell you a joke and Siri will recite a haiku. Jibo will do that, and more: the new home robot can sense when you’re feeling down and try to make you smile. At 11 inches tall and about three pounds, Jibo isn’t much bigger than a vase of flowers. Cynthia Breazeal, a social robotics expert at MIT, designed the $749 bot to exhibit something approaching empathy.

Deep learning has also spawned a number of emerging AI leaders and Richard Socher exemplifies their career trajectories and ambitions—advancing AI research as PhD candidates but not pursuing an academic career, starting companies and/or joining forces with established ones, all with a burning drive to make a big practical impact on the work and lives of as many people as possible.

For about a decade, brain scientists like Charles Cadieu have run image recognition tests pitting computers against monkeys. The test measures how well monkeys can quickly process images on a screen, and then compares it to the performance of a machine. Cadieu calls this the “neural substrate that makes recognition possible.”

Quoc Le, Research Scientist at Google was listed in MIT Technology Review's '35 innovators under 35 2014'. He decided age 14 that humanity would be helped most by a machine smart enough to be an inventor in its own right—an idea that remains only a dream. But it set Le on a path toward pioneering an approach to AI that could let software understand the world more the way humans do.

Clarifai is offering a service that uses deep learning to understand video. The company says its software can rapidly analyze video clips to recognize 10,000 different objects or types of scene. The technology can be used for things like matching ads to content in online videos.

EyeEm, the social photo-sharing community and marketplace, has unveiled a clever new technology that lets photographers upload their images and run them through an algorithm for instant keywording and aesthetic ranking.

Andrew Ng is a leading voice in “deep learning,” a branch of artificial intelligence in which scientists try to get computers to “learn” for themselves by processing massive amounts of data. He was part of a team that in 2012 famously taught a network of computers to recognize cats after being shown millions of photos.