The Year That Deep Learning Took Over the Internet | Artificial intelligence

Neural networks are the machine learning models that identify faces in the photos posted to your Facebook news feed. They also recognize the questions you ask your Android phone, and they help run the Google search engine. Modeled loosely on the network of neurons in the human brain, these sweeping mathematical models learn all these things by analyzing vast troves of digital data. Now, Hodgson, a marine biologist at Murdoch University in Perth, is using this same technique to find dugongs in thousands of photos of open water, running her neural network on the same open-source software, TensorFlow, that underpins the machine learning services inside Google.