Why Machine Learning

• Machine learning techniques have reached maturity (but, still limited).
• Growing flood of electronic data: Internet and private databases.
• Computational power is available.
• Budding industry.

Three niches for machine learning:

• Data mining : using historical data to improve decisions.
  • Retailers: wal-mart to Amazon.
  • The government.
  • Bioinformatics: a large problem domain.
• medical records → medical knowledge.
• Software applications we can't program by hand:
  • autonomous driving,
  • speech recognition,
  • self-customizing programs,
  • robots,
  • browsers that learn user interests.