Our ability to learn and get better at tasks through experience is part of being human. When we're born we know almost nothing and can do almost nothing for ourselves, but soon we're learning and becoming more capable every day. But did you know that computers can do the same? Machine learning brings together statistics and computer science to enable computers to learn how to do a given task without being programmed to do so. Just as your brain uses experience to improve it a task, so can computers. Say you need a computer that can tell the difference between a picture of a dog and a picture of a cat. You could begin by feeding it images and telling it, this one's a dog, that one's a cat. A computer program to learn will seek statistical patterns within the data that will enable it to recognise a cat or a dog in the future. It might figure out, on its own, that cats have shorter noses and that dogs come in a large variety of sizes. And then represent that information numerically, organising it in space. But crucially, it's the computer not the programmer that identifies those patterns and establishes the algorithm by which future data will be sorted. One example of a simple yet highly effective algorithm is to find the optimal line separating cats from dogs. When the computer sees a new picture, it checks which side of the line it falls on and then says either cat or dog. But of course there can be mistakes. The more data the computer receives, the more finely tuned its algorithm becomes and the more accurate it can be in its predictions. Machine learning is already widely applied. Is the technology behind facial recognition, text and speech recognition, spam filters on your inbox, online shopping or viewing recommendations, credit card for detection and so much more? At the University of Oxford, machine learning researchers are combining statistics and computer science to build algorithms that can solve more complex problems more efficiently, using less computing power, for medical diagnoses to social media. The potential of machine learning to transform our world is truly mind-blowing. To find out more about machine learning, visit oxfordsparks.iox.ac.uk, follow us on Twitter and find us on Facebook.