Unless you’ve managed to hide in a cave in the recent decades, you have most certainly heard of Facebook, the company that lets virtually anybody connect with someone across the world in a matter of seconds. In more recent times, however, you may have noticed that Facebook will show you a picture of yourself from an event you went to last week. You didn’t take the picture, nor did you upload it, yet somehow Facebook was able to tell that it was you. Why is this happening? Do I need to log off the grid? Who’s to blame?
The answer simply put: you can blame your overactive Facebook friend that tags you in every single picture. No you don’t have to move to a cabin and hide from society. And this is all thanks to the incredible force that is Machine Learning.
Now to the techy part. Machine Learning (ML) is a subcategory of Artificial Intelligence that allows computers to learn and predict outcomes by analyzing large amounts of data and recognizing patterns. Do this enough times, and computers will be able to carry out these tasks automatically. Remember the Facebook example? Your friend posted pictures of you so many times, and by tagging your face to your name, Facebook’s DeepFace technology was able to recognize your face without being explicitly told that it was you.
Like Facebook’s DeepFace, we see Machine Learning continue to grow and have a greater presence in our daily lives. In a way more complex setting, Google being able to predict what you are going to type next is a perfect example of how Machine Learning is being used to improve our lives by giving us more time to find that exact thing you so bizarrely typed in the search box. Even self-driving cars have immense Machine Learning algorithms built into their systems so they know not to hit the annoying driver in front of you.