Research Group for Applied Software Engineering
Forschungsgruppe für Angewandte Softwaretechnik

 

Machine learning is the sub-field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Evolved from the study of pattern recognition and computational learning theory in artificial intelligence, machine learning explores the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data – such algorithms overcome following strictly static program instructions by making data driven predictions or decisions, through building a model from sample inputs.

 
Machine learning allows us to tackle tasks that are too difficult to solve with fixed programs written and designed by human beings. From a scientific and philosophical point of view, machine learning is interesting because developing our understanding of machine learning entails developing our understanding of the principles that underlie intelligence. In the early days of artificial intelligence, the field rapidly tackled and solved problems that are intellectually difficult for human beings but relatively straight- forward for computers; problems that can be described by a list of formal, mathematical rules. The true challenge to artificial intelligence proved to be solving the tasks that are easy for people to perform but hard for people to describe formally; problems that we solve intuitively, that feel automatic, like recognizing spoken words or faces in images.
 
Machine Learning and its algorithms are about a solution to these more intuitive problems. This solution is to allow computers to learn from experience and understand the world in terms of a hierarchy of concepts, with each concept defined in terms of its relation to simpler concepts. By gathering knowledge from experience, this approach avoids the need for human operators to formally specify all of the knowledge that the computer needs.
 
Machine learning is employed in a range of computing tasks where designing and programming explicit algorithms is unfeasible; example applications include spam filtering, speech recognition, optical character recognition, search engines and computer vision.