Jeff Bier is promoting CNN

----  Jeff Bier is promoting CNN! ------

Thesis: Neural Networks? not again!

I used to say " when I hear the word RISC (or speech recog) I draw my guns". Things have slightly changed so instead theses days, my current one is "when I hear Neural Network ..."

I never had a really good fight with NN because I never met NN in the open. 

NN was an esoteric digital technique (like many others) found in the DSP conference papers. Over the years I have kept NN implementation of DCT, FFT, MAC, etc.. and never had a chance to take a look.

But recently I have seen  many micro-controllers promoting the technique. 

Antithesis: Neural Networks are alive and well

1. Matlab has a Toolbox
1. and maybe much more than that. 
2.  Jeff Bier put his money where his mouth is:
1. The Embedded Vision Alliance invites you to attend an exciting event --> see below:

Synthesis: No thanks, I pass on that one. I still think it is bleeding edge. 

Deep Learning for Vision Using CNNs and Caffe: A Hands-on Tutorial February 22, 2016 — Santa Clara, California A full-day tutorial focused on convolutional neural networks for computer vision and the Caffe framework for deep learning, presented by the primary Caffe developers from the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center, and organized by the Embedded Vision Alliance and BDTI. This tutorial takes participants from an introduction to the theory behind convolutional neural networks to their actual implementation and includes hands-on labs using Caffe. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have emerged as a very powerful technique for a range of computer vision tasks. This live tutorial begins with an introduction to the structure, operation, and training of CNNs and how they are used for computer vision. It explores the strengths and weaknesses of CNNs, and how to design and train them. The tutorial then explores the popular Caffe open source framework through a series of hands-on labs on creating, training, and deploying CNNs.