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01 Welcome 7 Min

This document introduces a free online class on machine learning, highlighting its significance and applications in various fields such as web search, photo tagging, and spam filtering. It emphasizes the importance of understanding and implementing machine learning algorithms, as well as the growing demand for skills in this area. The class aims to provide a formal definition of machine learning and explore different types of problems and algorithms in upcoming sessions.

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Nabyendu Adhikari
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9 views3 pages

01 Welcome 7 Min

This document introduces a free online class on machine learning, highlighting its significance and applications in various fields such as web search, photo tagging, and spam filtering. It emphasizes the importance of understanding and implementing machine learning algorithms, as well as the growing demand for skills in this area. The class aims to provide a formal definition of machine learning and explore different types of problems and algorithms in upcoming sessions.

Uploaded by

Nabyendu Adhikari
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Welcome to this free online class on

machine learning. Machine learning is one


of the most exciting recent technologies.
And in this class, you learn about the
state of the art and also gain practice
implementing and deploying these algorithms
yourself. You've probably use a learning
algorithm dozens of times a day without
knowing it. Every time you use a web
search engine like Google or Bing to
search the internet, one of the reasons
that works so well is because a learning
algorithm, one implemented by Google or
Microsoft, has learned how to rank web
pages. Every time you use Facebook or
Apple's photo typing application and it
recognizes your friends' photos, that's
also machine learning. Every time you read
your email and your spam filter saves you
from having to wade through tons of spam
email, that's also a learning algorithm.
For me one of the reasons I'm excited is
the AI dream of someday building machines
as intelligent as you or me. We're a long
way away from that goal, but many AI
researchers believe that the best way to
towards that goal is through learning
algorithms that try to mimic how the human
brain learns. I'll tell you a little bit
about that too in this class. In this
class you learn about state-of-the-art
machine learning algorithms. But it turns
out just knowing the algorithms and
knowing the math isn't that much good if
you don't also know how to actually get
this stuff to work on problems that you
care about. So, we've also spent a lot
of time developing exercises for you to
implement each of these algorithms and
see how they work fot yourself. So why is
machine learning so prevalent today?
It turns out that machine learning is a
field that had grown out of the field of
AI, or artificial intelligence. We wanted
to build intelligent machines and it turns
out that there are a few basic things that
we could program a machine to do such as
how to find the shortest path from A to B.
But for the most part we just did not know
how to write AI programs to do the more
interesting things such as web search or
photo tagging or email anti-spam. There
was a realization that the only way to do
these things was to have a machine learn
to do it by itself. So, machine learning
was developed as a new capability for
computers and today it touches many
segments of industry and basic science.
For me, I work on machine learning and
in a typical week I might end up talking to
helicopter pilots, biologists, a bunch
of computer systems people (so my
colleagues here at Stanford) and averaging
two or three times a week I get email from
people in industry from Silicon Valley
contacting me who have an interest in
applying learning algorithms to their own
problems. This is a sign of the range of
problems that machine learning touches.
There is autonomous robotics, computational
biology, tons of things in Silicon Valley
that machine learning is having an impact
on. Here are some other examples of
machine learning. There's database mining.
One of the reasons machine learning has so
pervaded is the growth of the web and the
growth of automation All this means that
we have much larger data sets than ever
before. So, for example tons of Silicon
Valley companies are today collecting web
click data, also called clickstream data,
and are trying to use machine learning
algorithms to mine this data to understand
the users better and to serve the users
better, that's a huge segment of
Silicon Valley right now. Medical
records. With the advent of automation, we
now have electronic medical records, so if
we can turn medical records into medical
knowledge, then we can start to understand
disease better. Computational biology.
With automation again, biologists are
collecting lots of data about gene
sequences, DNA sequences, and so on, and
machines running algorithms are giving us
a much better understanding of the human
genome, and what it means to be human.
And in engineering as well, in all fields of
engineering, we have larger and larger,
and larger and larger data sets, that
we're trying to understand using learning
algorithms. A second range of machinery
applications is ones that we cannot
program by hand. So for example, I've
worked on autonomous helicopters for many
years. We just did not know how to write a
computer program to make this helicopter
fly by itself. The only thing that worked
was having a computer learn by itself how
to fly this helicopter. [Helicopter whirling]
Handwriting recognition. It turns out one
of the reasons it's so inexpensive today to
route a piece of mail across the
countries, in the US and internationally,
is that when you write an envelope like
this, it turns out there's a learning
algorithm that has learned how to read your
handwriting so that it can automatically
route this envelope on its way, and so it
costs us a few cents to send this thing
thousands of miles. And in fact if you've
seen the fields of natural language
processing or computer vision,
these are the fields of AI pertaining to
understanding language or understanding
images. Most of natural language processing
and most of computer vision today is
applied machine learning. Learning
algorithms are also widely used for self-
customizing programs. Every time you go to
Amazon or Netflix or iTunes Genius, and it
recommends the movies or products and
music to you, that's a learning algorithm.
If you think about it they have million
users; there is no way to write a million
different programs for your million users.
The only way to have software give these
customized recommendations is to become
learn by itself to customize itself to
your preferences. Finally learning
algorithms are being used today to
understand human learning and to
understand the brain. We'll talk about
how researches are using this to make
progress towards the big AI dream. A few
months ago, a student showed me an article
on the top twelve IT skills. The skills
that information technology hiring
managers cannot say no to. It was a
slightly older article, but at the top of
this list of the twelve most desirable IT
skills was machine learning. Here at
Stanford, the number of recruiters
that contact me asking if I know any
graduating machine learning students
is far larger than the machine learning
students we graduate each year. So I
think there is a vast, unfulfilled demand
for this skill set, and this is a great time to
be learning about machine learning, and I
hope to teach you a lot about machine
learning in this class. In the next video,
we'll start to give a more formal
definition of what is machine learning.
And we'll begin to talk about the main
types of machine learning problems and
algorithms. You'll pick up some of the
main machine learning terminology, and
start to get a sense of what are the
different algorithms, and when each one
might be appropriate.

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