Chapter 2: Getting off the Ground with the First Deep Learning Model

Deep learning (DL) models have gained tremendous popularity in recent times and have caught the attention of data scientists in academia and industry alike. The reason behind their great success is their ability to solve the simplest yet oldest problem in computer science—computer vision. It had long been the dream of computer scientists to find an algorithm that would make machines see like humans do… or at least be able to recognize objects. DL models power not just object recognition but are used in everything, from predicting who is in an image, to natural language processing (NLP)—where they can be used for predicting and generating text and understanding speech—and even creating deepfakes, such as videos. At their core, all DL models are built using neural network (NN) algorithms; however, they are much more than just a NN. While NNs have been used since the 1950s, it's only...