An Introduction to Deep Learning

Modeling data via artificial neural networks (ANN) is not a new concept. Most of the underlying techniques have been known since the 1940s. It has to be pointed out though that a series of recent advances in how the networks are trained and utilized form the foundation of today's Deep Learning ecosystem. It is a fair statement that the recent advances brought forward by Deep Learning reflect a new era in Machine Learning (ML) that revolutionized many domains of signal and information processing. This holds true beyond the commonly discussed speech and object recognition science but also branches into computer vision, natural language processing, or information retrieval related fields.