NIPS 2013 Recap + big Ersatz announcement

Hello neural network aficionados,

NIPS (Neural Information Processing Symposium) happened in December and it was quite a show. Deepmind demoed reinforcement learning using neural networks to win at Atari games. Amazon busted out some delivery drones and tried to convince us it totally wasn't a PR stunt. Mark Zuckerberg even stopped by to let us all know that he thought we were awesome.

Some really cool research was presented too. One speaker provided interesting evidence suggesting that convolutional nets are already better at feedforward image recognition than monkeys. Who knew? There were several papers that looked into Dropout in more detail, uncovering more information about what's actually happening under the hood. There was some interesting research re: deep recurrent neural networks. Lots of stuff about convolutional nets. Some people are building FPGAs for neural networks now. There was a bunch of really cool stuff covered.

So anyway, let's meetup and talk about all of that. For the first part of the meetup, I'd like to open it up to anyone who wants to give a lightning talk (~5 minutes about a deep learning topic), and if no one wants to go, I'll just talk about research that was particularly interesting that came out of NIPS.

For the final part of the meetup, I'm going to show off my company's neural network product Ersatz doing some cool neural network stuff. I'll have a couple big announcements re: all of that too, so stick around...

It's at the same place it's been the last few meetings. Beer and chairs will be provided. See you there!