Q:

Real world usage for artifical neural networks

I have written an artifical neural network (ANN) implementation for myself (it was fun). I am thinking now about where can I use it.
What are the key areas in the real world, where ANN is being used?

A:

ANNs are an example of a "learning" system, one that "trains" on input data (in some domain) in order to effectively classify (unseen) data in that domain. They've been used for everything from character recognition to computer games and beyond.
If you're trying to find a domain, pick some topic or field that interests you, and see what kinds of classification problems exist there.

A:

Most often for classifying noisy inputs into fixed categories, like handwritten letters into their equivalent character, spoken voice into phonemes, or noisy sensor readings into a set of fixed values. Usually, the set of categories is small (23 letters, couple of dozen phonemes, etc.)
Others will point out how all these things are better done with specialized algorithms....

A:

I once wrote an ANN to predict the stock market. It succeeded with about 80% accuracy. 
The cue here was to first get hold of a couple of million rows of real stock data. I used this data to train the network and prime it for real data. There were about 8-10 input variables and a single output value that would indicate the predicted value of the stock on the next day.
You could also check out the (ancient) ALVINN network where a car learnt to drive by itself by observing road data when a human driver was behind the wheel.
ANNs are also widely used in bioinformatics.

