Coffee & Viz – Deep Neural Networks: Exploration and Practical Applications

In this talk Dr. Healey, Goodnight Distinguished Professor in NC State's Department of Computer Science, will discuss the area of deep learning, with a specific  focus on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a class of deep neural  network often used for image analysis. The talk will begin with a very brief  overview of the deep learning area, followed by a more focused  discussion of CNNs. Dr. Healey will then present two ongoing projects in his  research laboratory: a method to visualize the internal structure and  response of a CNN to specific inputs or classes of inputs, and a system that can generate content for faces that have significant areas "removed" by a grey mask. The face completion can not only generate a unique, photorealistic repair; it can also control properties of the result, for example, whether the individual is smiling of frowning, whether (given sufficient ambiguity in the original, masked image) the individual looks like a male or a female, and so on. The talk will conclude with examples, both positive and negative, of the face completion system.