What is Machine Learning?

All of us must have heard about Machine Learning for at least once in our lives. It is one of the hot topics or we can say it is one of the areas that is containing high possibilities in near future in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

Machine is Learning by itself :P

Let I start with a simple definition that can be understood by even a non-technical person:

When we talk about machines in computer science, directly or indirectly we are talking about Computers. Computers can perform all the tasks pretty efficiently that has been given to them by users, for example, I have given a complex mathematical problem to my computer, it will hardly take milliseconds to come up with the correct answer that is the power of the computer. But if I provide it a picture and want it to recognize that who is in the picture whether it's a human or an animal, it won't be able to tell or answer. That shows, our machine is not intelligent by nature.

So what is Machine Learning then, Machine Learning can be defined as a type of Artificial Intelligence that provides the ability to a computer to learn by themselves without being programmed explicitly.

The Computers are by default programmed to perform a particular task for example if it is programmed to perform a calculation it will only do that, it won't do some other task. Machine Learning provides the capability to a System or a Computer to start learning by itself without any intervention of human being. 

• Let us take the real time examples of Machine Learning Implementations, We all do shopping online, we all purchase clothes, gadgets from Amazon and all e-commerce giants. Whenever we visit the websites there is a section of Products Recommendation, where we see all the products listed according to our previous searches, how it is possible it is possible because of Machine Learning.
  
  
  
  
  

• Another example is of Facebook News Feed, there we often see that news and activities that are according to our liked posts or shared posts, for example, if News Feed is showing activity of a particular friend and we are providing a response to it , then Facebook will start showing more activities of that particular friend in News Feed it is all because of algorithm that has been developed by Facebook using Machine Learning.


• Self Driven cars have created such a hype in the market and it is believed that they become reality in near future, it is all because of Machine Learning. Let us assume that a self-driven car is running on the streets and there is a board of Stop written over there but due to some problems it is not clearly visible, as a human being we can recognize it by seeing its red color and we will stop over there but how the machine the car recognize it is the concept of Machine Learning that will tell the machine that you have to stop it here. A company named Tesla is working on this concept of Self-driving Cars and the Google self-driving car project is now "Waymo". Waymo stands for a new way forward in mobility.
  


• Email Spam Detection is another application of Machine Learning, the Mails that seems spam to mail clients like Gmail or yahoo they directly send them to Spam Folder.


• Behavioral Advertisements that we see when we make a search on Search Engine is also the implementation of Machine Learning, the pages we visit often is being taken into consideration while showing ads to us.


• Recently Google Launched and app called Allo, in it the app will automatically provide us the possible replies to messages there also Machine learning is implemented. It also recognizes the images and gives us possible replies that can be made for them.
  

It is believed that the area of Machine Learning has not been explored heavily till now, so there are lots and lots of possibilities there. If it is implemented well in near future which it seems like will happen for sure then we surely will see machine becoming more intelligent and can understand most of the things by themselves only.