Looking for interesting topic from neural networks area.

Question

I'm preparing to give a talk about some topic I choose from artificial intelligence area (neural networks). I'm looking for something interesting, used in a real life and preferably not too complicated (the simpler it is, the easier it is for students to understand and the more interested they will be). I thought that it's a good place to look for advice ;)

Answer 1

Learn your neural net the sine wave. It's simple. You only need 4 neurons. And the weights will clearly show how it's working. It was the example that made it click for me.

Answer 2

Code applying neural networks to text recognition.

I think the concept of text recognition is interesting and understandable.

Answer 3

Toby Segaran's interesting book "Programming Collective Intelligence" contains a simple neural net example for learning search results relevancy. He offers the code from the book free on his site.

The neural net is in chapter4 code. Not sure if you could figure out the code without the text - if you don't mind spending a little money, the book certainly wouldn't hurt.

Answer 4

The "Real life applications" section of the (english) Wikipedia article about "Artificial neural networks" lists some (quite general) applications of neural networks.

Answer 5

You can show your students neural network learning progress like a movie, see:

Sharky Neural Network - Neural networks in action

For better understanding of neural networks.