ART 80F - MODULE 1 LECTURE CONTENT
Machine Learning v.s. TRADITIONAL Programming
From 2016 WIRED feature The End of Code
Over the past several years, the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley have aggressively pursued an approach to computing called machine learning. In traditional programming, an engineer writes explicit, step-by-step instructions for the computer to follow. With machine learning, programmers don't encode computers with instructions. They train them. If you want to teach a neural network to recognize a cat, for instance, you don't tell it to look for whiskers, ears, fur, and eyes. You simply show it thousands and thousands of photos of cats, and eventually it works things out. If it keeps misclassifying foxes as cats, you don't rewrite the code. You just keep coaching it.
This approach is not new—it's been around for decades—but it has recently become immensely more powerful, thanks in part to the rise of deep neural networks, massively distributed computational systems that mimic the multilayered connections of neurons in the brain. And already, whether you realize it or not, machine learning powers large swaths of our online activity. Facebook uses it to determine which stories show up in your News Feed, and Google Photos uses it to identify faces. Machine learning runs Microsoft's Skype Translator, which converts speech to different languages in real time. Self-driving cars use machine learning to avoid accidents. Even Google's search engine—for so many years a towering edifice of human-written rules—has begun to rely on these deep neural networks. In February the company replaced its longtime head of search with machine-learning expert John Giannandrea, and it has initiated a major program to retrain its engineers in these new techniques. “By building learning systems,” Giannandrea told reporters this fall, “we don't have to write these rules anymore.”
But here's the thing: With machine learning, the engineer never knows precisely how the computer accomplishes its tasks. The neural network's operations are largely opaque and inscrutable. It is, in other words, a black box. And as these black boxes assume responsibility for more and more of our daily digital tasks, they are not only going to change our relationship to technology—they are going to change how we think about ourselves, our world, and our place within it.
Machine Learning + Image Enhancement
From MIT Technology Review Article on Machine Learning + Image Sharpening
If you close your eyes and imagine a brick wall, you can probably come up with a pretty good mental image. After seeing many such walls, your brain knows what one should look like.
A startup in the U.K. is using machine learning to enable computers and smartphones to model visual information in a similar way. A computer could use these visual models for various tasks, from improving video streaming to automatically generating elements of a realistic virtual world.
