I’ve seen so much awesome stuff in my forays into Machine Learning as part of the course I’m doing, I thought I’d present for your entertainment and information my top 5 machine learning resources. (Kayla Harris suggested this infographic if you’re looking for a quick introduction to how ML is used in industry).
No, come back – some of this stuff is actually quite cool, I promise!
Here goes, in no particular order:
How to make $1M with Machine Learning and Netflix
Netfix offered a $1M prize for a team that could best their video classification technology by a significant margin.
The netflixprize page tells the official story, and the presentation attached to this blog post is well worth a look.
Detexify – Handwritten symbol recognition
For those of you that use LaTeX, you’ll know the pain of trying to find the code for a symbol if you can’t remember it. Detexify lets you draw a symbol on the screen, then uses machine learning techniques to recognise it and tell you which codes it thinks you need. The accuracy is astonishing – a really good showcase for the potential of the techniques.
Lego Mindstorms Robots that Learn
This JavaWorld article takes Lego Mindstorms and adds a pinch of Machine Learning to make a robot that learns to follow a path on the ground.
I highly recommend this article for a casual read, it’s very nicely written and accessible but does delve into the theory and mathematical foundations of the Perceptron algorithm at the heart of the article.
Machine Learning at videolectures.net
There are 794 presentations and lectures – that’s not a typo, seven hundred and ninety-four – on every aspect of machine learning you could dream of here, at videolectures.net, from a range of sources. Many are quite approachable for the layperson.
The Singularity Summit
To wrap up, the Singularity Summit seems to be the forum for the players in the general Artificial Intelligence arena to talk about the past, future and philosophical implications of AI.
The Conversations Network hosts a free podcast series for the summit – personally, I really enjoyed James Hughes’ twenty-odd minute talk, in which he answers one of the great unanswered questions – if you’re standing on a railway bridge, are you safer stood next to an artificial intelligence or a human being?
That’s All Folks
I hope there’s something in there that’s given you some food for thought. If you have any stuff that you think is awesomely cool in this space, drop me a comment so I can check it out!
crossedstreams.com 
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