The Next Generation of Neural Networks

There is a Google Tech Talk called "The Next Generation of Neural Networks" by Geoffrey Hinton that talks about some very cool neural network architectures and applications. This guy has been doing neural networks for a long time, and he seems to have some cool ideas on how to use them that he really believes are much better then whats been done. In particular he doesn't have to use back-propagation, and gets to learn features automatically if they are not known beforehand.

The speaker is funny, interesting, and presents some really cool material. I was very impressed by his demonstration of his hand writing recognition program- you will just have to watch the talk to see why its so very cool.

I definitely recommend this talk, though I had to watch it more then once to understand a lot of it, and I'm still unclear on some parts (my failing, not the speakers). One thing that I thought was interesting to note was that in the examples he gives of his new network outperforming other techniques, some of the much simpler algorithms did pretty well. They aren't as good as his, but its interesting that the simplest algorithms can do pretty well in a lot of cases.