Human beings are incomparable for their wild imagination! They had been depicting thought-capable artificial beings in the myths, folk-stories, fiction from the distant past. At some point of life we all were obsessed with the idea of intelligent machine solving our problems! To be honest, whenever we face human problems, seemingly un-pleasant and unsolvable, we wish for an intelligent machine!
Once referred to fiction, today machine learning is not only real but also a fast-growing field of computer science. Machine Learning focuses on designing algorithms that allow machines to make decisions based on information. ML is the field of computer science that uses statistical techniques to give computer systems the ability to learn with data, without being explicitly programmed. ML engineers design the complex algorithms that enable machines to access the increasing availability of digitized information, find patterns, and add insights in places.
ML is often mistakenly confused with artificial intelligence (AI). ML is a distinct field although closely associated with AI. AI refers to the broader concept of machines carrying out tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence, where as ML is one application of artificial intelligence. Since ML is a specific way to achieving artificial intelligence through algorithms and data, it is rather closely related to Statistics. MI focuses on methods and models borrowed from statistics and probability theory.
We have already started experiencing the ML outcome every day! Based on our previous consumption pattern streaming services recommend a new brand or shop, the texting application guesses the rest of the sentence while texting. These are examples of how machine can adjust its behavior based on information it can gather on its own.
Canada had been a pioneer in the development of ML, a lot of the science and theory that is driving modern machine learning was developed in Canada. Canada even exported a significant no of specialists to USA in the past. But the brain drain has recently shown a sign of reversal as the demand for ML specialists is expected to rise up to 60% by 2018.
Big data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning these technologies are increasingly shaping future employment sectors. A person trained in ML algorithms, supervised learning, clustering, data preparation, feature selection, ML techniques of regression and classification can get a very rewarding job instantly. According to Indeed.com the average annual salary of machine learning engineers across Canada is $102,822, with those based in Toronto and Vancouver earning an average of approximately $110,000 a year.
Well, the challenge that ML specialists may face is since ML is relatively a new technology; things aren’t quite fully mature yet. Therefore the people who love challenges, who are thrilled to shaping the young field, who enjoy long hours of debugging, rewriting things, and solving problems may join this hottest employment sector.
Same as any other job there would be frustrations associated to this job too, but the ML professional can claim the credit of bringing life to imaginary thought-capable machine from the tale!