"HOW COMPUTERS CAN TEACH THEMSELVES TO RECOGNIZE CATS"

• A Network of 16,000 computers trained itself to recognize a cat by looking at 10 million images from YouTube videos. Today, the technique is used in everything from Google image searches to Facebook’s newsfeed algorithms.

• “What it’s about is allowing the computer to learn how to represent information in a more meaningful way, and doing so at several levels of representation,”

• “There are many ways you can represent information, some of which allow a human decision maker to make a decision more easily,”

• Similarly, deep learning allows a computer (or set of computers) to take a bunch of raw data — in the form of pixels on a screen, for example — and construct higher and higher levels of abstraction. It can then use these abstract concepts to make decisions, such as whether a picture of a furry blob with two eyes and whiskers is a cat.

• The self-learning approach has led to dramatic advances in speech- and image-recognition software. It is used in many Internet and mobile phone products, and even self-driving cars.