Technology

 Machine learning What is machine learning? You probably use it dozens of times a day without even knowing it. Each time you do a web search on Google or Bing, that works so well because their machine learning software has figured out how to rank what pages. When Facebook or Apple's photo application recognizes your friends in your pictures, that's also machine learning. Each time you read your email and a spam filter saves you from having to wade through tons of spam, again, that's because your computer has learned to distinguish spam from non-spam email. So, that's machine learning. There's a science of getting computers to learn without being explicitly programmed. One of the research projects that I'm working on is getting robots to tidy up the house. How do you go about doing that? Well what you can do is have the robot watch you demonstrate the task and learn from that. The robot can then watch what objects you pick up and where to put them and try to do t...