algorithm to train neural networks with many layerskicking off the deep learning revolution netflix launches the netflix prize competitionwith one million dollar pursechallenging teams to use machine learning to improve its recommendation system' accuracy by at least team won the prize in ai achieves superhuman performance at checkerssolved by team from the university of alberta imagenet launches an annual contest--the imagenet large scale visual recognition challenge (ilsvrc)--in which teams use machine learning algorithms to correctly detect and classify objects in largewell-curated image dataset this draws significant attention from both academia and technology giants the classification error rate falls from in to just few percent by backed by advances in deep convolutional neural networks this leads to commercial applications of computer vision and object recognition microsoft launches kinect for xbox developed by the computer vision team at microsoft researchkinect is capable of tracking human body movement and translating this into gameplay sirione of the first mainstream digital voice assistantsis acquired by apple and released as part of iphone in october eventuallysiri is rolled out across all of apple' products powered by convolutional neural networks and long short-term memory recurrent neural networkssiri performs both speech recognition and natural language processing eventuallyamazonmicrosoftand google enter the racereleasing alexa ( )cortana ( )and google assistant ( )respectively ibm watsona question-answering ai agent developed by team led by david ferruccibeats former jeopardywinners brad rutter and ken jennings ibm watson is now used across several industriesincluding healthcare and retail google brain teamled by andrew ng and jeff deantrains neural network to recognize cats by watching unlabeled images taken from youtube videos google wins darpa' robotics challengeinvolving trials in which semiautonomous bots perform complex tasks in treacherous environmentssuch as driving vehiclewalking across rubbleremoving debris from blocked entrywayopening doorand climbing ladder facebook publishes work on deepfacea neural network-based system that can identify faces with accuracy this is near human-level performance and is more than improvement over previous systems xiv preface