A Practical Introduction to Neural Networks

This talk will provide a brief introduction to neural networks and their uses and applications. I will cover basic network components such as nodes, connections, activations and layers, and give a rough sketch of how they are trained. I will also outline some common network architectures and their uses in image and language processing. The remainder of the presentation will give a sample of interesting emerging applications, open problems and difficulties arising in theory and practice, and finally some pointers to books and software packages for getting started on using them.