Image Source: Linked In Machine Learning is a hot I+D topic. One of the strategies used in Machine Learning is to learn by means of neural networks. You can get a free introduction to neural networks here . I also warmly recommend Andrew Ng's introductory course to Machine Learning on Coursera . Machine Learning neural networks were inspired by biological neural networks, and are easily applied but highly effective in image processing algorithms, like handwritten text recognition. More complex neural networks algorithms are being implemented on what is called Deep Machine Learning, using neural networks with many layers of complexity. Typically a neural network is trained, or it learns, from its exposure to thousands of 'good' and 'bad' examples of the image to be recognized or classfied. For example, a neural network that has to recognize handwritten numbers, will be exposed to thousands of examples of numbers written by different people, and even with
