What does the future hold for machine learning?

By Elly Yates-Roberts on 29 November 2018

In the midst of an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, it is difficult to know what is actually happening within the technology. According to Christopher Bishop, director of the Microsoft research lab (MSR) in Cambridge, although we are a long way off from achieving human-level intelligence in a machine, the current technological steps are revolutionising machine learning. Indeed, we are progressing to enable machines to learn from their own experiences so that they can acquire their own intelligence.

“With machine learning, we have a radically different way of creating software because instead of programming the machine to solve the problem, we program the machine to learn and then we train it using data,” Bishop said in a recent episode of The Microsoft Research Podcast. What is fuelling machine learning is data.

Bishop said that, with the increasing number of smart cities extracting data from our communities, the internet of things (IoT) and instrumenting our bodies we are able to gather more data than ever before, thereby fuelling the revolution in machine learning. “The real excitement for the next few years is going to be this exponential growth in our ability to create new technologies, not by programming machines, but by having them learn.”

Listen to the Microsoft Research Podcast in full.