Last week in a Fog City convention center, the word “networking” took a new meaning. Hundreds of business professionals and researchers gathered at the 2018 San Francisco Deep Learning Summit to share their advances in the hottest subdiscipline of Artificial Intelligence: deep neural networks.

Deep neural networks, also called deep learning, is a modeling approach loosely inspired by the way our brains work. Deep learning models have been wildly successful in a broad range of tasks such as image recognition, movie recommendations, drug discovery, and beating masters at games. And the pace of progress is exponential.

Many of the industry leaders driving the innovation graced the Summit stage.  Among them was Ian Goodfellow of Google Brain, who invented Generative Adversarial Networks (which train two competing neural nets to do crazy things like turn horses into zebras). We also had an opportunity to attend the hands-on workshop on Generative Adversarial Networks where we put input images of celebrities through generator and discriminator and outputs realistic celebrity-like images that you could manipulate (such as adding blonde hair or glasses or make them smile or frown, or turn woman into man). Deepgram’s Scott Stephenson spoke about creating a “Google for sound” that can understand how we naturally speak. We also heard from Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller on about the future of AI.

In traditional Silicon Valley style, over twenty AI startups were present to advertise and recruit. We met useAIble, an end-to-end machine learning startup that offers interpretable modeling solutions for business processes. Promising technologies from Luminoso, RiseML, objects.ai and others floored us in their live demos. We even learned our ABCs from an intelligent children’s education iPhone app.

Although the conference focused on neural networking, our favorite part was the more traditional kind. We connected with founders, venture capitalists, researchers and students of the highest caliber. They infected us with a passion for tech innovation we hope to share with the MS programs in the Silicon Valley of the South, so that one day we might share our own advances on the next Summit stage.

*Article contributed by #TXMS Business Analytics 2018 Chloe Kwon and Jake Schmidt