This document outlines advances in deep learning and neural networks. It discusses challenges in machine learning like feature extraction. It describes how neuroscience experiments showed the brain's ability to learn new tasks. Neural networks aim to mimic the brain through techniques like backpropagation to train multi-layer models. Breakthroughs like pre-training and convolutional networks helped scale networks to many layers. Deep learning is now used in speech translation, image recognition, handwriting recognition and more.