How You Use Machine Learning Every Day

Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is the science of programming computers to improve their performance by learning from data. You already use machine learning if you log on to Facebook, or browse Netflix, but do you know how this technology will affect your business?

Find out more about the uses of machine learning with Thomas Malone, Faculty Director in the Machine Learning in Business online short course from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Transcript

Machine learning is a branch of the field of artificial intelligence, in which dramatic progress has been made in the last decade or so.

In a sense, it’s a way of programming computers to recognize patterns in data for themselves, without any humans having to explicitly describe all the patterns they want the computers to recognize. Of course, people learn many patterns in this way too, but until very recently, the ability of computers to do this was very limited. In the last few years, however, computer scientists have made dramatic breakthroughs in programming machines to do this, often using approaches like those used in the human brain itself. And sometimes, when computers use these techniques, they can learn patterns that even humans have never noticed before.

Machine learning is already a part of your daily life

You probably already use machine learning many times a day. If you use Facebook, for instance, Facebook uses machine learning to recognize the faces of people and pictures, and to decide which news items you may want to see. Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistant all use machine learning to recognize what you say and decide how to answer you. Amazon and Netflix use machine learning to decide what movies, TV shows, and books to recommend to you. Uber uses machine learning to predict when your driver will arrive, and PayPal and many banks use machine learning to detect and combat fraud.

The role computers play

Today’s computers have far more raw, computational power than before. Because it’s so much faster and cheaper to calculate, move and store information, the world is now awash in vastly greater amounts of data that can be used by machine learning programs. Computer scientists have developed powerful new algorithms for machine learning that wouldn’t have been feasible without these faster machines and more data.