Introduction to machine learning

Making sense in a messy world

You ready to start right now? Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Thank you.

There have been a number of shifts in the way we think about computing over the past few
decades.

The terminology 'artificial intelligence' has come in and out of favor in the scientific community.
Sometimes it's called machine learning. We tend to call it machine intelligence these days, I just
call it intelligence. And sometimes it's just the effort to build machines that are better.

So in the early days everything was built on logic. Doing mathematical integration problems.
Playing chess. But we realized that what the real challenges were were the things that people
can do every day.`

The real world is actually very messy, hard logical rules are not the way to solve really interesting
real-world problems.

You have to have a system that will learn to get the knowledge in. You can't just program it all in.
Artificial intelligence is an effort to build machines that can learn from their environment, from
mistakes and from people. And we're still at the stage where we don't know what is the right path
and the right breakthrough. So I mean there's certainly a whole raft of different approaches.

One of the subfields we call pattern recognition, artificial neural network, reinforcement learning,
for example. Statistical inference and probabilistic machine learning, supervised learning.
unsupervised learning and we're not quite sure what technique is going to lead to better systems.
And, in fact, it's probably not one technique for everything, it's probably a bunch of different
techniques and combinations of those techniques.

Any progress we make in building truly intelligent systems is going to depend on progress in
technology generally and until recently, we didn't have computers that were fast enough or data
sets that were big enough to do that. And so being able to take a particular problem and spread it
out over lots and lots of machines is a very important approach because it makes our research
faster.

So there's applications of artificial intelligence around us all the time. When it begins to work or it
does work it's all of a sudden given another name, we're all already using it and very comfortable
with it.

Things that now we regard as routine 30 years ago would have been regarded as amazing
examples of artificial intelligence, anti-lock braking, autopilot systems for planes, search,
recommendations, maps, to decide whether or not this particular email is spam or not spam.

The ability to translate one language to another with your phone, ten years ago if you tried to talk
to your computer or to your phone, you know, that would just be hopeless, we are seeing a
steady torrent of these tricks one after the other getting figured out right now.

I think a lot of people that are close to the field have this do have that kind of breathless sense
that things are moving quickly. It's a progressive thing. It's about building things that are slightly
better, slightly better, slightly better. Intelligence is really not going to be something that we ever
succeed in defining in a succinct and singular way. It's really this whole constellation of different
capabilities that all kind of are beautifully orchestrated and working together.

Predicting the long term future is very difficult. Nobody can really do it and the bad thing to do is
take whatever's working best now and assume the future's going to be like that forever.
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Key learnings
The world is filled with things that most of us are able to understand and react to without much
thought; a stop sign partially covered by snow is still a stop sign; a chair that's five times bigger
than usual is still a place to sit. But for regular computers, this type of intuitive logic is out of
reach. Today, machine learning is able to give computers this advantage through its advanced
technology. In this video, we'll explore how machine learning is beginning to improve computers
and many of the things we use them for.

Solving problems big small and prickly

As a kid, I was really inspired by the explorers, I grew up in Seattle, and Lewis and Clark were
kind of heroes locally. I wanted to be an explorer when I grew up. As an electrical engineer, I
would always look for new things that we can do that just – wherever possible. Machine learning
and research is an exploration, it feels like an intellectual exploration.
We've definitely seen a big uptick in the last five years in what machines are able to do,
compared to, say, the previous decade or two.
With the advent of a lot more data and a lot more computing power, we really can think bigger
and sort of change the game about what sort of models we can envision.
The real world is actually very messy, hard, logical rules are not the way to solve real world
problems. So machine learning is all about learning from examples.
Rather than writing 500,000 lines of code, we instead have the machine learn from observations
about the world. We look through a bunch of these examples in the machine-learning algorithm,
maybe millions, maybe billions, maybe even trillions, to identify the patterns and generalize from
there.
In the task of image recognition, we've been able to train models to take the pixels of an image
and from those pixels, learn high level features.
It starts to learn that, if you see a cake and you see a kid, it's maybe a birthday party. If you see a
cake and lots of kids, it's very likely a birthday party. That's essentially teaching the machine to
do the perceptions that we humans are so natural and so good at, you realize just how amazing
humans are, just how amazing your four-year-old is, who can recognize faces. Machine learning
has really been the beginning of a big revolution in the field of speech recognition.
To teach speech recognition, try to interact with a noisy room, we used real world sounds and we
mix it into the examples that we already have, “Is it cold outside, is it cold outside?” [repetitive
voice]
Now, no matter what the noise in the environment, our speech recognition systems can
understand what you're saying. They can separate out one speaker from another.
With machine learning, we have now an algorithm that learns how to simulate a human linguist.
A lot of the language that we see today, it's very informal, “Blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah,
and they say "Okay."
Interspersed with emojis and stickers. Now, with Google, we're getting to the point where you
can have a much more natural conversation.
The assistant product that we're building at Google uses the best of our machine learning
techniques, image understanding, natural language understanding. That's a promising direction
for developing systems that can really navigate the mess of the real world. We wanted to make
this an open source project, so that everyone outside of Google could use the same system
we're using inside Google.
There are lots of people who have made very, very creative uses of it without knowing a single
bit of machine learning. So they have the ideas. They don't need to do the heavy lifting that we've
already done.
I saw a cool example where somebody used to have a cat going around their house all the time,
so they trained the model to identify whenever the cat was there and it would turn the sprinklers
on to scare the cat away.
This elderly couple in Japan who ran a cucumber farm and one of the big tasks is to sort
cucumbers into, like, prickly ones, less prickly ones, straight ones, curved ones. It's actually a
complicated task. So the wife would spend many hours a day sorting cucumbers, so the son
picked up a computer vision model and was able to build a system to categorize the cucumbers
and sort them automatically. All the time wasted sorting cucumbers is just gonna be used in
much better ways.
387 million people with diabetes are at risk for diabetic retinopathy. It causes blindness, the way
that you can find signs of diabetic retinopathy is by taking pictures of the back of the eye, but
there's just simply not enough doctors and it takes hours for an interpretation. So we trained an
algorithm that can read the images right then and there. The algorithm can help the doctors get
more people screened for the disease.
The more you see machine learning and the kinds of things it can do, the more you see
opportunity for it to improve people's lives. You can use machine learning to save power at
significant scales, even track the spread of diseases and epidemics.
We can use a computer vision model for everyone who's visually impaired. We could make a
speech recognizer for everyone on the planet and drastically improve the experience of millions
and billions of people.
I don't see any area of science or even of human endeavor that learned systems can't help with.
If you'd asked me a few years ago if a computer would be able to do this any time soon, I would
have said, "I don't really think so."
It's very, very empowering to imagine what's going to come. We're thinking thoughts and doing
things that, you know, no man has ever done, and sort of setting forth and setting foot in really
new intellectual territory here.
The promise of AI and machine learning is that we can actually produce solutions to previously
unsolved problems that will really help people.
Key learnings
From helping farmers in Japan to sort cucumbers to assisting doctors in India as they diagnose
eye disease, machine learning is changing the way people use code to solve problems and
improve lives. In this video, we'll explore how machine learning is useful in solving a wide array
of problems across industries, fields, and applications.
Applying machine learning to business problems

The fundamental idea of machine learning is to take some part of a software system that we
used to program explicitly with a set of rules and instead, have the machine learn to do that task.

Machine learning is good, both at automating processes, and also at making processes more
efficient. The kind of businesses that profit from the sort of machine learning we have today are
businesses where there's some kind of simple informational process that you want to deliver. For
example, at Google, we use machine learning across our products and services. We've used it
for everything from automatically translating web pages into different languages, to helping users
search for their photos, to automatically composing email responses. But there may be places in
your business where you're doing something fundamentally similar that's about information. It
could be anything from a bank trying to detect fraud in its transactions, or someone running an
Etsy store trying to recommend art to its customers.

It's still fundamentally about the process of taking something that's repetitive and kind of frankly
boring to humans, and automating it. But it's now operating at a different level. Machine learning
can do a lot of things, but it doesn't mean it's the right answer to every problem. If you're an
accounting firm, you don't need to use machine learning to discover how to add two numbers.
You already have software that does that perfectly.

If you are trying to decide how to use Machine Learning in your business, if you have a data
science team, that's the right set of folks to start talking to first. But if you are a small business,
you actually probably want to focus on a single exciting idea, an opportunity for how machine
learning could make a really big difference in what you offer or how you offer it.

One of the most important things is having examples of the behavior that you want the machine
to learn. So in practice, machines learn best from correct examples being demonstrated to them,
and then learning to follow suit. So you're looking for an opportunity where you have some task
that has been done hundreds or thousands of times, and you have very good records of exactly
how it should be done correctly and then you can use machines in order to automate doing that
same behavior for millions or billions of times.

Given that machines learn from examples, that they learn from data, you have to have some
amount of data to even get started. Machines learn much more slowly than humans do. So
where as it might only take having to show a human how to do something ten times, it would
probably take a machine a hundred or a thousand times to learn to do that same task.

Until recently, one of the major barriers to entry for companies who wanted to explore machine
learning was the availability of good software. TensorFlow is an open-source software package
that Google developed internally for our own machine learning systems, and we've released that
externally for other companies and academic institutions to use.

The idea is that rather than having to build machine learning from scratch, we provide a sort of
erector set of the basic elements of machine learning that you can use to build your own
products and services.

Machine learning may be great at automating existing processes, or making existing processes
more efficient, but it's not able to discover, or decide what the right next step is. That kind of
creativity and leadership is what you, as business people, have to bring to the process.

For every new tool set you have to give yourself the time to explore and to experiment with it.
The first time you try it, it's not going to work perfectly and just magically solve all of your
problems. The opportunities to use machine learning are unique to every business, and there are
many possibilities that we haven't even imagined yet.
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Key learnings
Machine learning is a powerful tool for businesses. It can unlock new opportunities to grow, as
well as help automate existing processes to make them more efficient and effective. In this video,
we'll explore how businesses can get started with machine learning and apply this technology to
their needs.