13th
Gov't-Funded Machine Learning
Machine learning will probably be one of the most important technological advances that affects the future of humanity and our ability to become more productive. It actually amazes me that I haven’t really heard of a machine learning project that attempts to augment human learning. (I assume such a project is fairly ambitious, but it seems like a worthy goal.) My understanding of machine learning is admittedly on the level of “Intro to Machine Learning” — so all of the potential sounds really exciting, but I’m sure the actual progress/development in machine learning algorithms is painfully slow and seemingly impossible.
That said, I think machine learning is a worthwhile field of study, and I think it’s good that there’s some gov’t stimulus money going towards teaching computers. There’s a $1 million NSF grant to create a machine learning system that improves the search results of limited databases. The program is called Osmot, and it looks like it’ll be open source. I’m not sure how they’ll measure improvements over other search methods, but any system that aims to improve the filtering digital data will probably have some value. There’s too much data for humans to sift through!
