The field of Artificial Intelligence is currently being revolutionised by a technique known as "deep learning". This lecture will trace the origins of deep learning back to pioneering work conducted in the 1940's and 1950's by cyberneticians and cognitive psychologists such as McCulloch, Pitts, Hebb and Rosenblatt. The talk will then explain how it has taken 70 years for technology to catch up with the ideas of these visionary scientists. The talk will provide an intuitive understanding of how modern deep learning works. We will look at how deep learning has led to transformative advances in the performance of many tasks including speech recognition, language translation, image classification and robot navigation, using some examples of research done at the University of Sheffield. Finally, we will review the application of deep learning in the creative arts. Could deep learning be used to create a great piece of art, or a hit record?

Professor Guy Brown is the Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is a world leader in the field of machine hearing, a topic at the forefront of artificial intelligence that aims to develop computer systems that can understand sound in the same way as a human listener.