“People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and, they’ve already taken over the world.”

Computers have helped us in a wide variety of things including calculation, sending messages.

The fact is that we don’t consider computer to be “intelligent” as traditionally they are incapable of taking any decision on their own unless “we” program it.

Suppose we search for an image of an elephant, then it is not the computer that will give images containing an elephant, it is still us who programed the computer to give these results by telling them that it contains elephant. So till now  computer can’t do anything “smart”.

Won’t it be great if during a live streaming, computer tell us whenever an elephant wanders in front of the camera? And computer helps us in predicting the weather accurately? Machine Learning is what aims to solve problems like these. Machine Learning is about teaching computers to learn the same way we do, by interpreting data available around us, classifying it and learning from its successes and failures.

Machine Learning is a branch of larger discipline of Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is a more vast and wider topic which aims at creating computers or machines as intelligent as humans.

A very famous definition for Machine Learning given by Arthur Samuel in 1959 is like “Machine Learning is subset of computer science that gives computers ability to learn without being explicitly programmed”.

To put it in simpler examples, have you ever seen an ad or picture about something you recently searched on the side and corners?like this

And you are surprised that how actually internet knows what we have recently searched on the internet? This is where Machine Learning comes to play. This is done by the behaviour of what content you browse on the internet. You don’t get to know and everything goes in background. The height of machine Learning come when you see advertisements like this on the page.Suggesting you to dating sites or best machine to reduce weight. Another most encountered application of Machine Learning is Face Recognition:This is where a computer program can identify an individual from a photo. You can find this feature on facebook for automatically tagging people in photos where they appear. Under this context,advances in Machine Learning means more accurate auto-face tagging softwares.

Machine Learning algorithms enable computers to communicate with humans and autonomously drive cars.

 

It would be quite interesting to know about the history and evolution of Machine Learning.

In early ages of artificial intelligence many researchers used to  dream of machines learning from datas. They approached the problem with many symbolic methods, which were then called neural networks. Later probability was also used in it especially in medical diagnosis. Later probabilistic systems were condemned by theoretical and practical knowledge of data acquisition and representation. In 1990s Machine Learning was recognised as a separate field. The field changed its goal from a knowledge-driven approach to a data-driven approach. So that computers can draw conclusions  or “learn” from the results.

In 2010, The Microsoft Kinetic can track 20 human features at a rate of 30 times per second ,allowing people to interact with computer via movement and gestures.

Most recent milestone in the field of machine learning is achieved by Google in 2016, where Google’s artificial intelligence has beaten a professional player at chinese board game Go,which is considered to be the world’s most complex board games.

Some scientist think that computers can never “think” in the way that a human brain thinks. But every dream seems impossible until achieved.Also seeing the recent advancement in the field of Machine Learning we can surely tell that it will grow to a great extent and also possible that  the day might come when computer starts thinking in the way we do.

 

Many famous people like the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Vinod Khosla predicted that 80% of medical doctors jobs would be lost in the next two decades to automated machine learning diagnostic software.

Also, on 5th January 2017,in IIT Kharagpur, Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO laid stress and on the importance of  Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence. He highlighted how advances in Deep learning Algorithms are core part of what Google has in store for the future.

So it is quite evident that Machine Learning is really going to be one of the Key factors in development of the world, in coming future.