3 Review(s)

In just the past five years, deep learning has taken the world by surprise, driving rapid progress in such diverse fields as computer vision, natural language processing, automatic speech recognition, reinforcement learning, and biomedical informatics. Moreover, the success of deep learning on so many tasks of practical interest has even catalyzed developments in theoretical machine learning and statistics. With these advances in hand, we can now build cars that drive themselves with more autonomy than ever before (and less autonomy than some companies might have you believe), smart reply systems that automatically draft the most mundane emails, helping people dig out from oppressively large inboxes, and software agents that dominate the world’s best humans at board games like Go, a feat once thought to be decades away. Already, these tools exert ever-wider impacts on industry and society, changing the way movies are made, diseases are diagnosed, and playing a growing role in basic sciences from astrophysics to biology.