# Tech Tuesday: Brainy Project Idea

**Published by:** [Continuations](https://continuations.com/)
**Published on:** 2012-12-04
**Categories:** tech tuesday
**URL:** https://continuations.com/tech-tuesday-brainy-project-idea

## Content

I ended last week’s Tech Tuesday with a call for ideas for a sample project and got a couple of suggestions. Since then though I have come across a great idea for a project. And since I am teaching my Skillshare class today and therefore spending most of the morning hours reviewing my materials, I am keeping this post short to share the idea and its background. It’s simple: build a brain. OK, so that’s a vast overstatement. Really it will be more like simulating a bunch of neurons. But a lot has happened since I first read about neural networks in Rumelhart and McClelland’s Parallel Distributed Processing (1986). And recent progress seems like there is real movement in the field. A lot of it seems to come from Canada. There is Geoff Hinton’s work on deep learning at the University of Toronto. And separately Chris Elisamith’s work on a structurally realistic brain with visual recognition, memory and output. Also, there was a recent paper by two Google engineers on learning to recognize faces without an explicit training set. Building something even at the toy level here will be a fun excuse to read up a bit more on these recent developments.

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