The Quest for Machine Learning

“AI is the new electricity” – Andrew Ng

Welcome to the age of AI! This is the century of artificial intelligence. The scientists and engineers
driving artificial intelligence forward will have a greater role in shaping the world of future. In fact, key
sectors that make up much of the world economy, from oil & gas, transportation and medicine to
aviation, finance and defense, are already being reinvented with artificial intelligence. The explosion of
interest in AI in recent years has been driven by Machine Learning.

In one sentence, Machine Learning is the automation of discovery----the scientific method on steroids---
that enables intelligent robots and computer to program themselves. Machine learning algorithms
formulate hypotheses, refine them and only believe them when their predictors come true. So, basically
Machine learning uses complex algorithms, a set of concrete instructions written by humans to solve a
problem, to teach a computer concepts like scanning chess moves or street map data. Here are some
examples of learning problems:

Predict whether a patient, hospitalized due to a heart attack, will have a second heart attack. The
prediction is to be based on demographic, diet and clinical measurements for that patient. Forecast the
price of a stock in six months now, on the basis of company performance measurements and economic
data. Classifying mail as spam or ham. Identify potential credit default customers. Several other
numerous applications of Machine Learning.
The Quest for Machine Learning
‘’Most of the Knowledge in the world in the future is going to be extracted by machines & will reside in
machines”. - Yann LeCun, Director AI Research Facebook.

There are five main paradigms in Machine Learning Viz. Symbolists, connectionists, evolutionary,
Bayesian and psychology.

The Symbolists: This group of Machine Learning practitioners focus on the promise of inverse
deduction. Instead of starting with a premise and looking for the conclusions, inverse deduction starts
with a set of premises and conclusions and work backward to fill in the gaps. Robotic scientist is the
application of inverse deduction. Eve, an artificially-intelligent robot scientist could make drug discovery
faster and much cheaper.

The Connectionists. The greatest learning machine on Earth is the one inside our skull. This approach is
based on connecting artificial neurons in a neural network. The most famous example of this approach is
Deep Learning. Connectionists techniques are very efficient in areas such as image recognition and
machine transition.

The Evolutionaries. This machine learning discipline focuses on applying ideas of genomes and DNA in
the evolutionary process to data processing.

The Bayesians. Another well-known group within machine learning, the Bayesians focus on handling
uncertainty using probabilistic inference. Vision learning and spam filtering are some of the classical
problems tackled by the Bayesian approach. Self-driving cars have Bayesian learning in their Brain.

The Analogizers: ‘Reasoning by analogy’. This machine learning discipline focuses on techniques to
match bits of data to each other. The most famous analogizer model is the “nearest neighbor”
algorithm.

Data-ism is today’s philosophy. The quest for universal learning is one of the most significant, fascinating
and revolutionary intellectual developments of all time.AI will manifest its powers in new area, one that
could have even greater economic and business implication than cars that drive themselves or the
warehouse that run Amazon’s vast operations. It will become the next Thomas Edison.

By- Mithilesh Kumar. https://www.facebook.com/imitationgame17/