Under the Hood of the New Artificial Intelligence: Machine Learning

Everybody hears of late about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being applied with great success to many business problems, and how it can now perform many tasks better than humans. The technology behind these stories is very often Machine Learning (ML), a branch of AI that deals with computers being able to learn to make predictions or take decisions based on vast amounts of raw data. The success of Machine Learning in tasks that computers had performed very poorly in the past, like speech recognition, automatic translation, and image or handwriting recognition appears to be effortless to a point of seeming magical. Professionals able to apply these techniques are in great demand across many industries, earning very high salaries. The talk will review a number of the technologies involved in Machine Learning, to show the basic intuitions that underlie them, and present examples of how they are applied.