From the dawn of computers, people programmed rules for computers to follow. With machine learning, computers program themselves by learning from data. Machines have traditionally had a hard time with this.

But computers are now very good at looking at an image and telling if it’s a cat or dog. How?

If you give a computer enough examples of cat and dog images, labeled with which animal it is, the computer can learn the rules on its own. In other words, the computer will make statistical associations between the properties of cat images that make them cat-like, and the properties of dog images that make them dog-like.

This simple process has been used to do things that are changing the way we live.

Compared with humans, computers have the distinct advantage of doing this at a much larger scale and much more quickly than we can, and the distinct disadvantage of only being able to use information that has been captured and provided in a machine-readable way.

As increasingly more data is created and captured, the advantage dominates the disadvantage in many instances that matter for organizations.

Read the full article on machine learning by Greg Lipstein at Impact Insights