How Machine Learning Shapes the World
By: Yeji Han
Tags: Machine Learning, Technology, Startup

Machine learning is one technique of AI.

Machine learning(ML) is used behind the scenes to impact our everyday lives and inform business decisions and optimize operations for some of the world’s leading companies as well as novel startups.

Let’s find out where ML is put to practical use. After reading this post, you will be inspired to learn how to code machine learning by yourself.

1. Spotify

To unlock the potential of human creativity — by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it.

Spotify, an online music streaming service, is well-known for its superb recommender system. To recommend a user with multiple contents gained its importance as the subscription business sprouted. Services that we subscribe no longer charge users by their packets nor the number of access. Providing users with a satisfied experience in the service, thus retaining them from canceling the payment is a key to success. Spotify is great doing this by its recommender system.

Spotify recommends you songs based on collaborative filtering. To give you a simple analogy, if a person A listens to a song alpha, beta, and gamma. A person B who also listens to alpha and beta will like listening to gamma. This is how collaborative filtering works. Several other technologies like user-based and content-based recommender system are also applied.

If you want to learn more about recommender systems applied to the industry, check this link. https://medium.com/s/story/spotifys-discover-weekly-how-machine-learning-finds-your-new-music-19a41ab76efe

2. Google

Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

This gigantic company unequivocally use machine learning all over the place. However, to pick out of several, Google has an amazing NLP (Natural Language Processing) technologies. Its technologies are applied to humans’ major communication medium: speech. A speech synthesizing machine literally creates human voice when we type in sentences. This text-to-speech model can reproduce voice of people who cannot make articulatory movements. Indeed, Google recreated a voice of a former NFL star Tim Shaw who are diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

I had a chance to know this amazing project from YouTube Originals series called “THE AGE OF A.I.” This documentary introduces several companies with a great ingenuity applying artificial intelligence in various fields from making prosthetic legs to space explorations. Follow the link to watch it! https://youtu.be/UwsrzCVZAb8

3. SUALAB

Pursue members’ happiness through fair rewards to hard work and pleasure of work. Contribute to the world by setting people free from machine-like work.

SUALAB uses machine vision for factory automation. In previous industrial grounds, faulty products should be selected by human eyes. However, SUALAB uses object detection and instance segmentation to find defects from a photo of a product. Object detection is one area of computer vision that specify an object inside an image. For example, when you take a photo of a street, finding objects on the street and classifying them whether they are cars or humans is the role of object detection. Instance segmentation draws a contour to specifically what pixels of the image are cars or humans. Using such technology, SUALAB’s appraoch dramatically reduces manpower waste

An engineer in SUALAB introduces how machine learning can be applied to computer vision in the following link. It really helped me understand trends of object detection and instance segmentation which are major problems that machine vision solves. https://hoya012.github.io/

To me, knowing how machine learning is applied to the world made me major in this field of study. I always feel that I can be one of those game changers. For subsequent posts, I will write about how I study machine learing by my own road-map.