our ability to learn and get better at
tasks through experience is part of
being human
when we are born 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 a task
so can 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 programmed to learn will seek
statistical patterns within the data
that will enable it to recognize a cat
or dog in the future it might figure out
on its own that cats have shorter noses
and dogs come in a larger variety of
sizes and then represent that
information numerically organizing 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 tunes its algorothm becomes
and the more accurate it can be
in its predictions. Machine learning is
already widely applied. It's the technology
behind facial recognition, text to speech
recognition, spam filters on your inbox,
online shopping or viewing
recommendations, credit card fraud
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
From 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 www.OxfordSparks.ox.ac.uk
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