As machine learning breakthroughs abound, researchers look to democratize benefits - Next at Microsoft

When Robert Schapire started studying theoretical machine learning in graduate school three decades ago, the field was so obscure that what is today a major international conference was just a tiny workshop, so small that even graduate students were routinely excluded. But it has become one of the hottest fields in computer science, turning once-obscure academic gatherings like the upcoming Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in Barcelona, Spain, into a sold-out affair attended by thousands of computer scientists from top corporations and academic institutions. "It's been really something to see this field develop, and to see things that seemed impossible become possible in my lifetime," said Schapire, a principal researcher in Microsoft's New York City research lab whose machine learning research is widely used in the field. The NIPS conference, which starts Monday, is so popular because machine learning has quickly become an indispensable tool for developing technology that consumers and businesses want, need and love. Machine learning is the basis for technology that can translate speech in real time, help doctors read radiology scans and even recognize emotions on people's faces.