CSC 4510 – Machine Learning

Dr. Mary-Angela Papalaskari

Department of Computing Sciences

Villanova University

Course website:

www.csc.villanova.edu/~map/4510/

Introduction

CSC 4510 - M.A. Papalaskari - Villanova University

Machine Learning

CSC 4510 - M.A. Papalaskari - Villanova University

3

What is Learning?

• Herbert Simon (1970): “Learning is any process by which a system improves performance from experience.”

4

What is Machine Learning?

• Arthur Samuel (1959): Machine Learning: Field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.

Why Study Machine Learning?Engineering Better Computing Systems

• Develop systems that are too difficult/expensive to program explicitly because they require specific detailed skills or knowledge tuned to a specific task– Personalized news or mail filter– Personalized tutoring

SPAM

CSC 4510 - M.A. Papalaskari - Villanova University

Why Study Machine Learning?Cognitive Science

• Computational studies of learning may help us understand learning in humans and other biological organisms.– Hebbian neural learning

• “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”– Human’s relative difficulty of learning disjunctive

concepts vs. conjunctive ones.– Power law of practice

log(# training trials)

log(

perf

. tim

e)

CSC 4510 - M.A. Papalaskari - Villanova University

Why Study Machine Learning?The time is ripe

•Large amounts of computational resources available.•Many basic effective and efficient algorithms available.•The world is driven by data (data mining).

– Market basket analysis (e.g. diapers and dvds)– News aggregation– Over 50m credit card transactions a day in the US alone.– The Large Hadron Collider produces 60 gigabytes per minute– Climate research centres generate 1-20 petabytes per year– Google processes 24 petabytes per day

CSC 4510 - M.A. Papalaskari - Villanova University

So, um, what’s a petabyte again?

CSC 4510 - M.A. Papalaskari - Villanova University

Humans can:

- think, learn, see, understand language, reason, etc.

Artificial Intelligence aims to reproduce these capabilities. Machine Learning is one part of Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial IntelligenceArtificial Intelligence

Computer VisionComputer Vision

Data MiningData Mining

Machine Learning

RoboticsRobotics

CSC 4510 - M.A. Papalaskari - Villanova University

Let’s try something

• You will be given instructions in class to collect data about your classmates

• Enter these data in the document provided

• We will use the decision tree algorithm from aispace.org/ to “learn” something about your sample

CSC 4510 - M.A. Papalaskari - Villanova University

Next time

• Some historical background on AI and a more careful definition of machine learning

• Discussion of Alan Turing article: “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” http://loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html

• See also:• Alan Turing website maintained by Andrew Hodges:

http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/• Philosophical objections to Turing Test

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

Some of the slides in this presentation are adapted from:

• Prof. Frank Klassner’s ML class at Villanova

• the University of Manchester ML course http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/ugt/COMP24111/

• The Stanford online ML course http://www.ml-class.org/

• Playing Turing’s imitation game

CSC 4510 - M.A. Papalaskari - Villanova University

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