The Buzzword - What is Machine Learning?

What exactly is Machine Learning, one of the hottest topics in the current IT industry?

Simply put, machine learning is technology that enables computers to learn and make decisions autonomously based on data.

While traditional programming involved computers following fixed rules defined by developers, machine learning allows computers to discover rules and patterns within data and solve problems.

For instance, an email spam filter learns from a vast array of emails, identifying specific patterns to differentiate between spam and legitimate emails.

AI powered by machine learning can rapidly learn from immense datasets and solve problems at great speed.

While it would be impossible for a human to read and classify thousands of emails for spam in a single day, an AI leveraging machine learning can accomplish this in a matter of seconds.

The origins of machine learning trace back to the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In the early 1950s, computer scientist Alan Turing first proposed the possibility of computers thinking like humans.

In 1956, the first academic conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI) took place in Dartmouth, USA, marking the birth of the term and concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

By 1959, Arthur Samuel had coined the term Machine Learning, demonstrating that computers could improve their performance through learning without explicit programming.

This milestone positioned machine learning as a crucial branch of AI, with continuous research leading to its essential role across diverse technical fields today.

Technologies we encounter daily, such as facial recognition, chatbots, recommendation systems, and speech recognition, are predominantly based on machine learning.

Machine learning, which identifies patterns from vast amounts of data to perform predictions and judgments, has evolved to include Artificial Neural Networks that mimic the human brain and the Deep Learning technologies that leverage them, becoming even more sophisticated.

In the next lesson, we will explore artificial neural networks in detail.