Ever seen a sci-fi movie wherein the intelligent robots/cyborgs (having both organic and mechanical elements) are created to leverage their capabilities in order to process human tasks smartly and rapidly. Yeah! You got it right. Artificial Intelligence is what I am talking about here.
And the moment those robots start to invade humanity in order to set up robotic reign on the basis of their intelligence post-processing all the historical, cultural and social data of humans, that’s what we call Machine learning! There are a plethora of such movies, Terminator, Robot overlords to name a few.
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Well, movies mirror the reality or should say ‘the imminent reality’ which implies that we have already baby stepped towards Artificial Intelligence and the prospects are really immense when incorporated with machine learning.
What Actually is Machine learning?
Machine learning, a subset of Artificial intelligence, is a set of techniques (algorithms) that 
analyze the vast data that is fed in, to derive the actionable insights.
Let’s take an example here: How do you think google serves you the search results relevant to you when you search for something on google?
Google analyzes your past search patterns and clicks (data fed into the machine) to show you up the web pages (actionable insights) most relevant to you using the algorithms (set of techniques) in google servers (machine). That’s is Machine learning for you and it gets better and better as more data is fed in.
The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want– Larry Page, Co-founder & CEO (Google)
Why and Where is it Gaining Momentum?
Why?
Every organization out there wants to exploit every single opportunity to make profits by providing better and personalized user experience and services.
Huge volumes of data being produced daily with cheaper computational and processing services and affordable data storage have made it possible to analyze bigger, complex data and deliver faster and accurate results.
This has led to the building of precise models using which organizations can tap into the latent opportunities to work more efficiently, increase profits and avoid risk using Data Mining technique.
Data mining Vs Machine Learning
Data Mining searches for the specific info while Machine learning does the given task
Ex: To teach someone driving is Machine Learning while using someone to search driving learning centers is Data mining.
Where?
Transportation services– to analyze patterns and trends to make routes efficient and predicting potential problems and increase profits. Beneficial for Public transports and other transport organizations.
E-commerce– to personalize the shopping experience by recommending the items based on your previous purchases and promote others items you’d be interested in.
Healthcare services– the advent of wearables and sensors has made machine learning trending which on one side assess your health in real time and on the other side predict the potential risks which help in earlier diagnosis and treatment.
Financial services– Machine learning serves two aspects here-1. Identify insights in data to help investors with investment time and opportunities. 2. To prevent fraud and identify clients with high-risk profiles.
Government agencies– They have multiple sources of data, analyzing which they can serve the purpose of public safety, detect fraud, minimize identity theft, predict geographical calamities etc. using data mining techniques.
Future of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning!
The future prospects of Artificial intelligence, as I said earlier, are huge.
‘Xiaomi claims to have sold 500000 smartphones between Oct 1-3 in India-The Indian Express’
When we come across news like this, the picture becomes quite clear that we are day by day getting more digitalized and producing huge data that is analyzed deeply using the algorithms and the insights are gleaned to serve more customized and personalized services.
Moore’s law states: the world’s data doubles every two years. It won’t be a surprise if the doubling rate surges.
That also does mean that we are continuously being read by the artificial intelligence and I can only wish this doesn’t end up like the one we see in sci-fi movies. Artificial intelligence is for humanity, not the other way around.