Robert Hecht-Nielsen

"a Neural Network is a set of mathematical expressions that are really good at recognizing patterns in information, or data."

"A NN accomplishes this through a kind of human emulated perception, but instead of seeing, say an image, like a human would, the NN expresses this information numerically contained within a Vector or Scalar (a Vector only containing one number)."

"MNIST can be seen as the ‘Hello World’ dataset because it is able to demonstrate the capabilities of NNs quite succinctly. The dataset is made up of handwritten digits, which we will train our NN to recognize and classify."

"To facilitate our implementation we are going to be using the Keras framework. Keras is a high-level API written in Python which runs on-top of popular frameworks such as TensorFlow, Theano, etc. to provide the machine learning practitioner with a layer of abstraction to reduce the inherent complexity of writing NNs."