We are living on the verge of a new era of computing, an era where computers are becoming more of a companion than a tool. The devices we carry in our pockets will soon better understand our world and us a lot better, and this will have a profound impact on how we interact with and use them.
But right now, a lot of these exciting advancements are stuck in the labs of researchers and not in the hands of designers and developers, making them usable and accessible to users. This is not because the details are locked away; on the contrary, in most cases they are freely available.
This gap is somewhat due to our contentment with sticking to what we know, having the user do all the work, making them tap on the buttons. If nothing else, I hope this book makes you curious about what is out there and how it can be used to create new experiences, or improve existing ones.
Within the pages of this book, you will find a series of examples to help you build an understanding of how deep neural networks work and how they can be applied.
This book focuses on a set of models for a better understanding of images and photos, specifically looking at how they can be adapted and applied on the iOS platform. This narrow focus of image-based models and the iOS platform is intentional; I find that the visual nature of images makes the concepts easier to, well, visualize, and the iPhone provides the perfect candidate and environment for experimentation.
So, as you go through this book, I encourage you to start thinking about new ways of how these models can be used and what new experiences you could create. With that being said, let's get started!
