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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday December 31 2017, @10:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the name-it-Cassandra dept.

New quick-learning neural network powered by memristors

A new type of neural network made with memristors can dramatically improve the efficiency of teaching machines to think like humans. The network, called a reservoir computing system, could predict words before they are said during conversation, and help predict future outcomes based on the present.

The research team that created the reservoir computing system, led by Wei Lu, U-M professor of electrical engineering and computer science, recently published their work [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02337-y] [DX] in Nature Communications.

Reservoir computing systems, which improve on a typical neural network's capacity and reduce the required training time, have been created in the past with larger optical components. However, the U-M group created their system using memristors, which require less space and can be integrated more easily into existing silicon-based electronics. [...] When a set of data is inputted into the reservoir, the reservoir identifies important time-related features of the data, and hands it off in a simpler format to a second network. This second network then only needs training like simpler neural networks, changing weights of the features and outputs that the first network passed on until it achieves an acceptable level of error. "The beauty of reservoir computing is that while we design it, we don't have to train it," says Lu.

[...] Using only 88 memristors as nodes to identify handwritten versions of numerals, compared to a conventional network that would require thousands of nodes for the task, the reservoir achieved 91% accuracy.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @02:23AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @02:23AM (#616311)

    Can't get excited about machine learning, all the time it will only be used for "targeted" advertising, and high-frequency trading.