Brittany Wenger – Neural Networks at age 17

Kudos to Brittany Wenger from Lakewood Ranch, USA for winning Google’s Science Fair Grand prize.Using a 6-node Artificial Neural Network (see her slides), and alot of cloud computing power, Brittany has managed to train the neural network to detect maligned breast tumors with an accuracy of 99.11%

Now, what is notable is that this girl is 17 years old. I was talking to some parents recently about how the amount of new knowledge being generated today is in the exponential scale. What this means is that they next generation of kids will have to learn more and in less time. Now, I am sure neural networks have been implemented by geniuses far younger than 17 years.

The comparison I would like to make here is that I learnt neural networks at age 20 (and with minimal successful commercial application), and as Britanny has a successful implementation of a neural network at age 17, I would now say that:

• My kids will probably be implementing neural networks at age 14-15
• Artificial intelligence is going to be more commonplace in the future.