How PayPal beats the bad guys with machine learning

When Amazon Web Services announced a new machine learning service for its cloud last week, it was a sort of mini-milestone. Now all four of the top clouds -- Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM -- will offer developers the means to build machine learning into their cloud applications. As InfoWorld's Andrew Oliver has observed, both machine learning and big data will eventually disappear as separate technology categories and insinuate themselves into many, many different aspects of computing. Fraud detection is first among them, because it addresses an urgent problem that would be impractical to solve if machine learning didn't exist. To get a sense of how machine learning is combating fraud, I interviewed Dr. Hui Wang, senior director of risk sciences for PayPal.