MIT aims to pry open 'black box' of machine learning systems

Do your IT experts know what the company's machine learning algorithms are doing? They almost certainly do not, according to Sam Madden, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT -- and that's a problem. "If you can't understand why the algorithm is going to work, when it's going to work or, worse, when it's going to fail, then you're going to have to be very cautious about putting these things into practice," Madden said at the recent MassIntelligence conference in Boston. The conference was a joint effort between the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council and MIT to bring industry and academic experts together to discuss advances in artificial intelligence (AI). Thanks to the enormous stores of data now available for crunching, massive compute power and better algorithm performance, machine learning has made impressive advances in image, speech and pattern recognition.