The Black Box that is Deep Learning
Deep Learning has — fundamentally — changed so much about how we approach problems across a ridiculous number of areas, and it’s only accelerating. It’s not just about doing amazing things with images like Style Transfer , or Painting , or even removing Henry Cavill’s mustache, it’s now getting deeply embedded in tools for Marketing , Dentistry , and Voice synthesis (because you want your GPS directions to be read out by your spouse maybe?). It’s all really good stuff, with one underlying issue, we don’t really know how the stuff works! Take the de-noising of images for example. Before Deep Learning came around, there was a ton of work — all rigorously based on mathematics and science — that went into the algorithms that were used. Partial differential equations, anisotropic diffusion, and a host of other techniques, all of which have solid theoretical foundations . And then, in 2012, Burger et al. threw De...