Tuesday, April 12, 2011

OReilly - Quiet Rise of Machine Learning

An interesting article from the OReilly Radar blog by Jenn Webb on the Quiet Rise of Machine Learning.  I love the insight from the article that decision sciences like Operations Research are getting more mainstream.  Machine Learning is that one science of mixing data mining and predictive analytics.  The methodologies of machine learning is nothing new.  Computers have been able to keep up with the mathematics and now skilled scientists are using these techniques all over industry. 

Yet to me what is interesting in this article is that implies that machine learning sciences is rising from basically nothingness.  As if this is some sort of new fangled technology developed by IBM for a special man vs. machine Jeopardy act.  I guess I'm a little too close to the Operations Research community to know where the roots really lie.  For one I'm happy that decision sciences like machine learning are getting more and more recognition.  On the other hand I'm thinking "Where have you been since World War II?".  I guess I'm a little too cynical lately.

I love the OReilly Radar blog as it seems more and more articles are about the promise of data analytics.  I guess I'm just wishing for a little more investigative reporting.  In fact I think it would benefit INFORMS if they partnered with OReilly Media.  OReilly definitely has a focus on analytics now and INFORMS is prime to provide a lot of great content for discussion. 

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