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My year in Big Data, ML and AI#

Although I’ve made this blog live a couple of months ago and it has a Big Data section, I didn’t have the time to work with technologies from this field very much, especially in the latter part of the year.

Even though I didn’t manage to test these technologies and implement them in a “homework” project, I’ve tried to keep myself up to date with things happening in this Big Data and Machine Learning ecosystem. And so, a small review of what small steps I managed to take this year:

  • Made a few submissions to a Kaggle competition and dipped my feet into the “deep” machine learning world
  • Tried to keep up to date or at least be aware of the latest innovations in terms of machine learning from renowned universities and scholars:
  • I found proof of a extremely interesting concept, which I knew was possible but never saw in a completed form, of computers being able to play games. This was in the form of MarI/O or “Machine Learning for Video Games” as said by SethBling, the author of the video.
  • Bots started to make some noise in the machine learning community and soon enough a few chat bots appeared in Facebook Messenger and will undoubtedly take off in the next year
  • Google’s Quickdraw showed that you don’t have to fear a smart AI and that you can have loads of fun with it
  • So many achievements and records have been set by AI systems where they were able to reach and surpass humans, like Microsoft’s speech recognition achievement
  • and many more, this is just off the top of my head

Everything I’ve just listed about this year’s ML and AI advancements gets me very excited. And if these aren’t sufficient, I’m sure that AI in 2017 will have at least double the impact that it had on the world in 2016. Things will become smarter, more pervasive and as Kevin Kelly mentioned in his Ted Talk from June this year, it will eventually be the second industrial revolution.