Why should I learn about machine learning?
Hi! My name is Anina and I'm a high school senior interning at Career Village. Because I'm interested in computer science, I always hear people telling me to learn machine learning. Why should I do that, rather than just learn to be a better programmer in general? #technology #programming #machine-learning
8 answers
Zachary’s Answer
Machine learning is one example of a specialty within computer science. Other examples would be: system design, security, web programming, databases, and so on.
Studying a specialty helps you stand out and helps you find jobs. It's pretty rare for a job posting to look only for "general programming"- they're usually looking for people with one or more specialties.
Machine learning is very hot right now and is being used more and more to solve tough problems. I'd say it's definitely worth looking into to see if it interests you, but if it doesn't, don't worry too much because there are plenty of other specialties to explore.
Lionel’s Answer
Machine Learning is an important algorthmic technique and an important discipline in itself. You could view it as part of Computer Science and has usefulness in the Internet of Things, Robotics, Neural Networks. It will become increasingly important as fields converge. It is different than just learning to be a good programmer, as that has traditionally been specific to languages, data structures, effective utilization of memory, cpu, disk and networks. However, I think someone that is interested in programming and has an algorithm leaning would grasp machine learning.
Mohan’s Answer
In todays fast pace environment every thing around us is getting automated and technology driven. Therefore, the applications and the devices which we are going to use needs to be goo enough to think and lean itself rather than taking actions in a programmed manner. That's where machine learning & deep learning comes into picture. As the era of machine learning is spreading like a forest fire you should be getting hold of this field as your interest of computer science is aligned with machine learning.
So, I would suggest that machine learning will be good platform to start with basic programming to have a challenging future for you.
Sameer’s Answer
As a first step you surely need to be a good programmer yourself. And you also need to develop confidence in various algorithms. That in fact is a pre-requisite to be a good ML programmer / data scientist.
But it becomes more interesting when you realize that in some situations, you can get better results if you can use machine learning (algorithms) instead of traditional programming techniques. E.g. you want to predict a weather pattern in a certain area or want to know how share market will perform tomorrow or develop a Chat-Bot which can answer questions on weather alerts.
So you get a chance to combine your skills in Maths and Statistics, Data of all kinds (numbers and text) along with Programming languages to solve some interesting and tough problems!
Daniel’s Answer
Good question !
Once you get your programming skills to a decent level, and you encounter enough "real world" problems you are trying to solve in this way :
1) get data -> 2) build a program based on what you see/ understand -> 3) produce output,
you can't not wonder if your solution to a problem is the best solution available.
Machine learning is the name of the field in computer science/ statistics that tries to find hidden patterns in the data given the data itself (1) and the output you are suppose to have (3) and produce the program (2) by itself without you explicitly programming any rules you might think are best.
Quite genius..
People may direct you there because the tech industry realises that a lot of use cases fit this scenario (recommendation, optimisation, prediction, anomaly detection etc.) and therefore people mastering machine learning are very useful right now!
I find it a super interesting subject and there are tons of online courses you can take to learn the basics and see if that's something that might interest you as well.
Good luck!
Wen’s Answer
D S’s Answer
Data is everything these days. Using ML, you extract insights from vast amount data. Every industry is leveraging ML to analyze the data and gain insights.
Monisha’s Answer
In simple words, machine learning is where you give the machine or system you build/code the ability to learn and better itself to serve the purpose it is built for.