our ability to learn and get better at
tasks through experience is part of
being human when we're bored we know
almost nothing and can do almost nothing
for ourselves but soon we're learning
and becoming more capable every day but
did you know that computers can do the
same machine learning brings together
statistics and computer science to
enable computers to learn how to do a
given task without being programmed to
do so just as your brain uses experience
to improve at a task so crew computers
say you need a computer that can tell
the difference between a picture of a
dog and a picture of a cat you could
begin by feeding it images and telling
it this one's a dog
that one's a cat a computer program to
learn will seek statistical patterns
within the data that will enable it to
recognize a cat or a dog in the future
it might figure out on its own
that cats have shorter noses and that
dogs come in a larger variety of sizes
and then represent that information
numerically organizing it in space but
crucially it's the computer not the
programmer that identifies those
patterns and establishes the algorithm
by which future data will be sorted one
example of a simple yet highly effective
algorithm is to find the optimal line
separating cats from dogs when the
computer sees a new picture it checks
which side of the line it falls on and
then says either cat or dog but of
course there can be mistakes the more
data the computer receives the more
finely tuned is how the rhythm becomes
and the more accurate it can be in its
predictions machine learning is already
widely applied the technology behind
facial recognition
CLEC scanned speech recognition spam
filters on your Inbox online shopping or
viewing recommendations credit card for
detection and so much more at the
University of Oxford machine learning
researchers are combining statistics and
computer science to build algorithms
that can solve more complex problems
more efficiently using less computing
power for medical diagnosis to social
media
the potential of machine learning to
transform our world is truly
mind-blowing to find out more about
machine learning visit Oxford sparks dr.
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