The Deep Learning Revolution
Learn more about deep learning technology and how hardware accelerated computing is influencing every industry and process, enhancing business outcomes.
The Scan AI Ecosystem
Deep learning and AI is likely to transform the productivity and time to results for research organisations and many industry sectors, but the true power of accelerated compute can only be realised when the entire ecosystem is understood. Powerful CPU / GPU servers require fast storage and low latency connectivity, deep learning frameworks can be enhanced by software to automate many data science tasks, and expert advice will be invaluable in choosing the best solution for your requirements and stage of your AI journey.
By clicking the diagram below you can understand how Scan can link all these areas together into a complete bespoke solution designed around you.
Deep learning in a nutshell
The basic idea is to train a very deep (i.e. lots of layers) neural network. Multiple studies have shown that neural networks, if appropriately configured, can reproduce any function (think universal Turing machines). However this doesn't mean that we know how to configure them.
This is where Deep Learning comes in as by having lots and lots of layers a Deep Neural Network will solve a problem in lots of little steps, rather than in one or two big steps.
While this may not seem such a revolutionary idea, it means that with a sufficiently large set of training data it is possible to train / configure these neural networks to solve tasks that have previously eluded us.
Deep learning revolution
While all this is true, the training of Deep Neural Networks is incredibly computationally expensive, not only are the networks themselves very large but huge data sets are required to train them well. Until recently we simply didn’t have the computational power, or access to the data required for Deep Learning to showcase what it can do, this changed with the use of NVIDIA graphics cards for parallel programming and Deep Learning is now almost exclusively trained on GPUs, while the deployment of the resulting trained networks can be a relatively light load.
Deep learning is essentially large (many complex layers) neural networks. What has changed over neural networks we knew in the 80s and the 90s compared to the current networks, is that (a) computers such as the NVIDIA DGX-1 have become fast enough, (b) data sets are big enough [imaging and video data], and (c) we can now (through many improved techniques) initialize the neural network training better
Deep Neural Networks
Most deep learning applications today are still very much supervised learning (although great strides are currently being made in unsupervised learning).
However, unlike other machine learning algorithms, whose performance plateaus with scale and volume of data, if we construct larger neural networks with greater quantities of data, their performance continues to increase.
How does Deep Learning work?
The most common form of Deep Learning applies to what is called a convolutional neural network, this is a special kind of neural network in which each artificial neurone is connected to a small window over the input or previous layer. For example, in a visual task, each neurone in the first convolution layer will only see a small part of the image, maybe only a few pixels. This convolution layer consists of multiple maps, each searching for a different feature, and each neurone in a map searching for that feature in a slightly different location.
This first layer will come (after some training) to identify useful low level features in the image, such as lines, edges, and gradients in different orientations. This convolution layer is then sub-sampled in what is called a pooling layer, before the whole process starts again with another convolution layer this time finding combinations of the features of the previous layer (lines, corners, curves etc). As with most neural networks, the parameters or weights of the system start out randomly, and the network will perform poorly. During training however you can program the network what the correct classification of an image is, and over many many examples the network parameters / weights are slowly modified to give the correct classification.
AI by Industry
Deep learning and AI has an increasing relevance in many industry sectors, as the technology advances and offers ever faster time to results and greater depth of insight from data. Learn how AI is being used in your particular area of industry.
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