Microsoft and OS hack

The hack, featuring software engineers from Microsoft who had travelled from across Europe and Africa to work with OS's machine learning team, used the city of Hull as a testbed. The trained machine model finished the week by correctly identifying 87% of the roof types it was shown. In its training the model was shown 500 flat roofs and 500 hipped/gabled roofs, set a confidence limit of 90%, which means it must be 90% confident or more for its assessment to count. Isabel Sargent, Senior Research and Development Scientist at OS, says: "Thanks to the excellence of the Microsoft team we have been able to work out together how to stream this machine captured data into our database for if and when we're ready to put machine learning into production. It's already very accurate, going from zero to 87% accuracy in just one week, but we need to increase its success rate. Although much slower, humans typically have an error rate of around 5%."