Artificial intelligence and Machine learning made simple

Lately, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is a hot topic in the tech industry. Perhaps more than our daily lives Artificial Intelligence (AI) is impacting the business world more. There was about $300 million in venture capital invested in AI startups in 2014, a 300% increase than a year before (Bloomberg). AI is everywhere, from gaming stations to maintaining complex information at work. Computer Engineers and Scientists are working hard to impart intelligent behavior in the machines making them think and respond to real-time situations. AI is transiting from just a research topic to the early stages of enterprise adoption. Tech giants like Google and Facebook have placed huge bets on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and are already using it in their products. But this is just the beginning, over the next few years, we may see AI steadily glide into one product after another.

According to Stanford Researcher, John McCarthy, Artificial Intelligence is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs. Artificial Intelligence is related to the similar task of using computers to understand human intelligence, but AI does not have to confine itself to methods that are biologically observable.

Simply put, AIs goal is to make computers/computer programs smart enough to imitate the human mind behaviour.

Knowledge Engineering is an essential part of AI research. Machines and programs need to have bountiful information related to the world to often act and react like human beings. AI must have access to properties, categories, objects and relations between all of them to implement knowledge engineering. AI initiates common sense, problem-solving and analytical reasoning power in machines, which is much difficult and a tedious job.

AI services can be classified into Vertical or Horizontal AI

These are services focus on the single job, whether thats scheduling meeting, automating repetitive work, etc. Vertical AI Bots performs just one job for you and do it so well, that we might mistake them for a human.

These services are such that they are able to handle multiple tasks. There is no single job to be done. Cortana, Siri and Alexa are some of the examples of Horizontal AI. These services work more massively as the question and answer settings, such as What is the temperature in New York? or Call Alex. They work for multiple tasks and not just for a particular task entirely.

AI is achieved by analysing how the human brain works while solving an issue and then using that analytical problem-solving techniques to build complex algorithms to perform similar tasks. AI is an automated decision-making system, which continuously learn, adapt, suggest and take actions automatically. At the core, they require algorithms which are able to learn from their experience. This is where Machine Learning comes into the picture.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are much trending and also confused terms nowadays. Machine Learning (ML) is a subset of Artificial Intelligence. ML is a science of designing and applying algorithms that are able to learn things from past cases. If some behaviour exists in past, then you may predict if or it can happen again. Means if there are no past cases then there is no prediction.

ML can be applied to solve tough issues like credit card fraud detection, enable self-driving cars and face detection and recognition. ML uses complex algorithms that constantly iterate over large data sets, analyzing the patterns in data and facilitating machines to respond different situations for which they have not been explicitly programmed. The machines learn from the history to produce reliable results. The ML algorithms use Computer Science and Statistics to predict rational outputs.

There are 3 major areas of ML:

In supervised learning, training datasets are provided to the system. Supervised learning algorithms analyse the data and produce an inferred function. The correct solution thus produced can be used for mapping new examples. Credit card fraud detection is one of the examples of Supervised Learning algorithm.

Supervised Learning and Unsupervised Learning (Reference: http://dataconomy.com/whats-the-difference-between-supervised-and-unsupervised-learning/)

Unsupervised Learning algorithms are much harder because the data to be fed is unclustered instead of datasets. Here the goal is to have the machine learn on its own without any supervision. The correct solution of any problem is not provided. The algorithm itself finds the patterns in the data. One of the examples of supervised learning is Recommendation engines which are there on all e-commerce sites or also on Facebook friend request suggestion mechanism.

Recommendation Engine

This type of Machine Learning algorithms allows software agents and machines to automatically determine the ideal behaviour within a specific context, to maximise its performance. Reinforcement learning is defined by characterising a learning problem and not by characterising learning methods. Any method which is well suited to solve the problem, we consider it to be the reinforcement learning method. Reinforcement learning assumes that a software agent i.e. a robot, or a computer program or a bot, connect with a dynamic environment to attain a definite goal. This technique selects the action that would give expected output efficiently and rapidly.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning always interests and surprises us with their innovations. AI and Ml have reached industries like Customer Service, E-commerce, Finance and where not. By 2020, 85% of the customer interactions will be managed without a human (Gartner). There are certain implications of AI and ML to incorporate data analysis like Descriptive analytics, Prescriptive analytics and Predictive analytics, discussed in our next blog: How Machine Learning can boost your Predictive Analytics?

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Artificial intelligence and Machine learning made simple