This Week in Machine Learning 28 August 2017

This week’s top Machine Learning stories: Is Microsoft really leading the way for Speech Recognition? Plus, can Machine Learning go beyond predicting trends, to actually creating them? All this, and more!
Machine Learning is one of the most exciting fields in the world. Every week we discover something new, something amazing, something revolutionary. That’s why we created This Week in Machine Learning! Each week we publish a curated list of Machine Learning stories as a resource to help you keep pace with all these exciting developments. New posts will be published here first, and previous posts are archived on the Udacity blog.
Whether you’re currently enrolled in our Machine Learning Nanodegree program, already working in the field, or just pursuing a burgeoning interest in the subject, there will always be something here to inspire you!
Academia
Apple’s first academic paper on recognizing images through adversarial training wins a best paper award at the Conference on Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition.
Finance
Ford Motor Company announces that it will use machine learning to process credit applications and approve new automobile loans.
Commerce
Researchers at Amazon develop new methods to use machine learning to predict, or even create, new fashion trends based on image recognition.
Media
Apple leverages deep learning to improve Siri’s formerly robotic-sounding voice, offering a side-by-side comparison of Siri’s new and old voice in their paper.
Speech
Microsoft’s speech recognition efforts reach a new industry record, achieving a 5.1% error rate, a mark that stands close to human performance.
Hardware
Microsoft unveils its Project Brainwave hardware, an effort to develop custom hardware built to support modern deep learning systems using reprogrammable FPGAs.

