# Did you know? Deep Network Designer

 I want to take a minute to highlight one of the apps of Deep Learning Toolbox: Deep Network Designer. This app can be useful for more than just building a network from scratch, plus in 19a the app generates MATLAB code to programatically create networks! I want to walk through a few common uses for this app (and perhaps some not-so-common uses as well!)
1. Building a network from scratch Clearly this is one of the top benefits of Deep Network Designer, and there is a great introductory video on this topic. Click on the image to watch the short video.
###### Link to full video
2. Importing a pretrained network and modifying it A second, popular use for the DND app is to import a pretrained network and modify it. Another great intro video is here:
###### Link to full video
3. Visualizing and describing network architectures Riddle me this: what type of network is this?
net = googlenet;
net.Layers
Series? DAG? How about when I show you this portion of the network in the app? You can quickly see this is definitely not a series network. (It's DAG!) The app lets you quickly visualize what the network looks like, and see which connections are made. This can be helpful for a deeper understanding of the network, or simply getting a high level overview of the structure. 4. What went wrong? Though not technically the Deep Network Designer*, there is a button that launches the deep network analyzer. Occasionally, I will get a question such as, "Why is my network erroring out?" and I always start the investigation with the analyzer. This will check for problems before you start training which eliminates the not-so-attractive red error message in the command window. *you can also get to the Network Analyzer programatically:
analyzeNetwork(net);
5. Learning more about deep learning This is not an official benefit of the app, but something I'll mention because it's helped me. Before I started using the app, I wouldn't have been able to tell you anything about "Leaky ReLU layers", since I didn't know they existed! By taking a look at all the different layers on the left**, I can pinpoint new layers I may want to learn about, then go to the documentation to learn more! For example, A leaky ReLU layer will take any input value less than zero and multiply it by a fixed scalar. In comparison, a regular ReLU will set anything less than zero to zero. **If you are looking for every layer that exists in MATLAB, here is a link to all layers in documentation. Hopefully you feel compelled to try the app right now. As always, you can get a free trial of all our deep learning tools to try the latest functionality: Link to Trial   Do you like this app, or like another app better? Let me know in the comments below.
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