What makes cancer hard is that it’s not one disease, but many. PD: Curing cancer is one of the most important problems in the world - perhaps the most important problem - and machine learning has a big part to play in solving it. Your book talks about what different “tribes” in machine learning research might contribute to curing cancer, and what their approaches lack. In the future cars will drive themselves, but you’ll have to know how to drive learning algorithms - and right now you probably don’t even know where the steering wheel or the pedals are. Think of a car as an analogy: only engineers and mechanics need to understand how the engine works, but you need to know how to drive it. If these algorithms are a black box to you, you have no control over where they will take you. As we just saw, they can determine not just what goods you buy but also whether you’ll get a job or even who your lifetime companion will be. PD: Learning algorithms make a lot of decisions on your behalf every day. Why is it important for someone who isn’t a computer scientist to understand principles of machine learning? In other words, machine learning is involved in pretty much everything we do these days. Online dating sites use machine learning to match their users - there are children alive today who wouldn’t have been born if not for machine learning. At many companies, when you apply for a job, a learning algorithm screens your resume. If you receive a credit card offer, chances are a learning algorithm picked you. Retailers use it to decide which goods to stock and how to lay out their stores. Siri uses learning algorithms to understand what you say and predict what you want to do. Google uses machine learning to decide which Web pages to show you, Amazon and Netflix to recommend books and movies, Twitter and Facebook to select posts for your feed. It’s like the scientific method on steroids: formulate hypotheses, test them against the data, refine them - except computers can do it millions of times faster than humans. PD: Machine learning is the automation of discovery - computers learning by themselves by generalizing from data instead of having to be programmed by us. What is machine learning, and how might a person encounter it in a typical day? 22, answered a few questions about the book. It unveils the deep ideas behind the algorithms that increasingly pick our books, find our dates, filter email, manage investments and run our lives - and what informed consumers and citizens ought to know about them.ĭomingos, who will speak at Seattle’s Town Hall at 7:30 p.m. Pedro Domingos, University of Washington professor of computer science and engineering, is the author of “The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World.”Ī popular science romp through one of today’s hottest scientific topics, the book is an essential primer on machine learning.
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