Tagged machine learning

Guest Post: Why Teach Machine Learning?

Guest Post by Limor Wainstein–

Why Teach Machine Learning?

Teaching machines to learn about the real world has been a goal in computer science since Alan Turing first showed how to mechanise logic. But it’s only recently that affordable hardware has evolved enough speed and capacity to make the idea commercially feasible in many domains – and more than feasible, seemingly inevitable.

Machine learning, alongside its siblings in data analytics and big data, is not only fashionable, it’s where the money and jobs are, thus attracting ambitious, commercially minded students. It’s also an increasingly important tool for all sciences, promoting interest among those aiming at careers in research and academia. Andrew Ng, former chief scientist at Baidu, the giant Chinese search engine company, and adjunct professor at Stanford, has called AI and machine learning ‘the new electricity’ for its potential to apply to and revolutionize all sectors of the economy and society.

That has become apparent in the job market. Towards the end of 2017, the Financial Times noted that three out of four of the top-paying jobs in software were for expertise in “the new profession” of machine learning. Ng says that the two biggest challenges for machine learning are acquiring the vast amounts of data required and finding skilled workers. Of the two, he said, the skill shortage is the biggest problem. Some entire job sectors, such as high frequency trading, are now entirely dependent on machine learning, and financial technology as a whole is moving in that direction rapidly. For example, J. P. Morgan recently issued a 280-page report on data analysis and machine learning in finance, focusing on the skills it needs to hire in large numbers – numbers that don’t exist.

Additional, highly-prominent machine learning domains exist alongside financial technology, for example, autonomous vehicles and medical diagnosis. Overtly AI-dominated companies like Google, Tesla and IBM are adept at garnering publicity. Such high-profile efforts mask the huge number of more mundane machine learning tasks that exist in every industry. Amazon, for example, uses machine learning across its entire retail system (from web interface to warehousing, packaging and delivery). Every company that operates with data at scale in retail has to follow those examples to compete.

Energy companies use machine learning to predict and manage supply and demand. Airlines manage pricing and route loading through machine learning. New medicines are developed using machine learning, and health services marshall their resources in response to short and long-term trends in demand, tracked and predicted by machine learning. Agriculture, ditto. In fact, it’s hard to find any area untouched by machine learning – even theology is in on the trend, with Murdoch University in Perth using machine learning to analyze ancient Thai palm-leaf texts on Buddhist doctrines. The new electricity, indeed.

So, what is machine learning?

Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence, but is mercifully free of the philosophical and near-religious arguments of some AI research. Instead, machine learning is simple to define and has well-defined tools, techniques and goals, and an ever-expanding field of practical applications.

Machine learning is the application of algorithms and techniques to data sets in order to find whether certain patterns exist. Whether this includes data acquisition and cleaning before analysis, or decision-making afterwards, depends on how tightly you want to draw the definition. All of these things are important in practical machine learning-based applications but are usually domain specific. However, the core of machine learning isn’t domain specific and can be applied very widely. This has led it to be taught as a self-contained field.

Machine learning is inherently cross-disciplinary, and this is the greatest challenge in teaching the subject. There is a huge and unavoidable mathematical component, involving statistics, predicate calculus, linear algebra, and related concepts. This can come as a shock to computing students who have successfully minimized their exposure to such mathematical ideas hereunto. Computing skills are equally important, as machine learning involves the efficient manipulation of large and disparate data sets through complex transformations, often in highly parallel environments. With many practical machine learning applications bounded by hardware limitations, a deep understanding of system architecture and its practical consequences is also necessary. These facts will come as an equal shock to students in statistical machine learning courses who have avoided significant programming or hardware experience. A good machine learning practitioner needs to be fluent not only in programming but in systems architecture and data design. In addition, the practitioner needs to understand which of the many mathematical techniques to apply to a particular problem and how to apply them correctly.

In a real-life work environment, a data scientist or data engineer will typically find machine learning techniques useful. She may even require them to excel at her job. For example, she may need to create algorithmic patterns to search for data, use data patterns to make decisions and predictions, or use other techniques, such as smart sorting or fuzzy logic to prepare and manipulate data. These skills are at the heart of modern data science. It is clear, therefore, that a serious data science program should provide solid coverage of machine learning skills and techniques.

How should you teach it?

Picking the exact mix of tools, languages, and technologies for a course is to some extent a secondary issue, and can easily be based on what resources and skills are available to best match your choice of syllabus, project work and structure. Machine learning is a product of the Internet age and as such has a continuing evolution of best practice in its DNA. Checking out – and participating in – online machine learning communities such as Kaggle is one of the best ways to ensure alignment between machine learning teaching and actual student needs.

As with any subject, some students will have the skills, interest or previous experience to easily follow one or both of the two major prongs of machine learning. Most will not. But teachers of machine learning have an advantage over their mathematician or computer science colleagues: they can use each prong to illustrate and contextualise the other. Students who experience a curriculum where each is taught independently often have problems – and this has been unfortunately common. On discussion boards where experienced ML practitioners advise students, disheartening comments abound.

Calvin John, an autonomous vehicle researcher, warned on Quora of his experience with a “…horrible textbook… very little conceptual basis for the theorems… bunch of isolated problems which were crudely connected in a very disjointed way”. Modern machine learning teaching is developing rapidly. Like many new interdisciplinary subjects, machine learning may be taught by different faculties, where each faculty is led by its own approach without relating to the needs of the other disciplines involved.

Andy J. Koh, program chair of informatics at the University of Washington, also discusses the subject of teaching machine learning in his essay “We need to learn how to teach machine learning”(August 21, 2017). He says: “We still know little about what students need to know, how to teach it, and what knowledge teachers need to have to teach it successfully.” He also points out the wide range of student abilities and experience among those interested in machine learning – not only from previous undergraduate courses, but from MOOCs and burgeoning commercial self-teaching online products. He nevertheless advocates the adoption of good pedagogical tools – evolving analogies and practical examples that combine theory and practice. It’s important, he says, to understand which concepts will be particularly difficult, realizing what ideas, good and bad, students bring with them.

It’s in the practical examples where machine learning teachers have the greatest chance to equip students with a good, broad and deep understanding of the field. Machine learning’s expanding applicability offers many choices – machine vision, text mining, natural language processing are popular examples. The topic should be suited to the project work across a syllabus. A judicious introduction of new mathematical ideas alongside practical work examples, or practical problems that lead to theoretical insights can reinforce student appreciation of the whole.

Here are some additional resources that discuss teaching machine learning:

A worked ML curriculum bringing together best-of-breed MOOC courses.

Another site that has several courses, including MOOCs and other deep-learning topics is fast.ai.

(They also have an interesting brief post on adding data science to a college curriculum)

This was a guest post by: Limor Wainstein

Limor is a technical writer and editor with over 10 years’ experience writing technical articles and documentation for various audiences, including technical on-site content, software documentation, and dev guides. She holds a BA in Sociology and Literature and is an MA student in Science, Technology, Society (STS) at Bar-Ilan University. Limor is focusing her studies on the sociology of technology and is planning her research around coworking spaces in Israel.