Google and Neural Networks: Now Things Are Getting REALLY Interesting,…

This article was first published on 2 April 2013.

This article is about an event that has quietly slipped beneath the radar.  It’s an event that may, however, turn out to be very important when the history of machine intelligence is written sometime down the track.  That event is Google’s recent purchase of the start-up – DNNResearch – a company whose primary purpose is the commercial application and development of practical neural networks.

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are computer systems built using mathematical models designed to mimic biological neural networks.    ANNs are particularly interesting because they open up the possibility of advanced machine learning.   While the idea has been around for a long time, the last couple of years have seen real progress in terms of development.

Applications include things like vehicle control, game-playing and decision making (backgammon, chess, poker), pattern recognition (radar systems, face identification, object recognition), sequence recognition (gesture, speech, handwritten text recognition), medical diagnosis, financial applications (automated trading systems, fraud detection), data mining, visualization and more.

The article does a fantastic job of outlining why ANNs are important and why Google’s acquisition of DNNResearch might just be a big deal, particularly against the backdrop of futurist and inventor, Ray Kurzweil’s recent move to team up with Google specifically to work with them on advanced artificial intelligence.  There’s no doubt big things are happening at Google and you can be sure this most recent acquisition is just one part of a much bigger plan to serve the future on a plate to billions around the world much more quickly than we ever might have expected.