Taking a Machine Learning Course

I started a Stanford course yesterday on Machine Learning.  It’ll be interesting to update my knowledge since things have changed a great deal in that area since I did an AI class at Waterloo 10 years ago.

Machine Learning has really taken off in the last couple years as the number of problems and the technical capabilities of AI algorithms has evolved.  In particular services like voice and text recognition are like magic.  Applications like self-driving cars, flying drones, game bots, chat services, marketing segmentation, bio data analysis and astrophysics have exploded with new use cases for this type of approach to software.

A good machine learning algorithm offers tremendous leverage, since it has the chance to solve problems that people have a hard time defining how to solve them.  A solid self-driving car system could disrupt a trillion dollar industry.  Self piloted drones could create a new trillion dollar industry.  These are algorithms that could impact everyone on the planet.

So I’m kind of excited to refresh my knowledge and learn a few new things.