What is Machine Learning (Azure ML Service)

Since 3 weeks Microsoft made the Azure Machine Learning generally available. But what is Machine Learning?
In this blog post i try to explain what you can do with it.

Machine learning is a method of teaching computers to make and improve predictions or behaviors based on some data.
It’s a fully managed service. So you don’t needto buy hardware or manage VM’s.

Data Scientists & Developers can use the browser-based machine learning IDE to quickly create and automate machine learning workflows.

In the screenshot below you can see a sample from Microsoft itself.

You can literally drag&drop existing ML libraries to your solution. You can also create your own custom “R” and “Python” scripts to extend them.

We can use Machine Learning in some different ways:

• **Data Mining: **ML can be used by people to gain insights from large databases
• **Statistical Engineering: **ML can be used to convert data into software that makes decisions about uncertain data
• Artificial Intelligence: ML can be used to emulate the human mind, to create computers that can see, hear and understand

I found a couple of examples on the internet

Malware Protection

The Microsoft Malware Protection Center has used ML to create software to detect malware. You can find more information on the blog from Dennis Batchelder.

Search Engine

Microsoft’s Bing Engine is a complex system that interprets your query, scours the web and returns information that’s useful for you. Because of the high volume of traffic it’s necessary to have an automated decision-making system to handle everything. A couple years ago the Microsoft Research team won a competition that used the algorithms that they developed.

Enable Computers to See and Hear

The software that can recognize gestures in the Kinect was created by ML. The Microsoft speech recognition system is based on deep learning, a form of ML model that is inspired by the structure of the brain. It’s also used to create a real-time speech to speech translator.

You can see how exciting it is to work with ML.
I will write also some how-to blog posts about the ML Service in Azure. To stay tuned…
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me.