Graeme Smith: Scotland at the heart of advances in machine learning

Advances in cloud computing, hardware, open-source software and algorithms have made it possible to analyse data in ways that simply would not have been practical a few years ago. Much of this success comes from machine learning - a set of techniques that allow us to make sense of large quantities of data and make predictions about what will happen next. Breakthroughs in machine learning are powering advances in almost every domain, from personalised product recommendations and autonomous vehicles through to drug discovery in healthcare and fraud detection in financial services. Traditional approaches to solving problems use hardcoded rules, which describe the solution step-by-step. In contrast, machine learning systems are set a task, and given a large amount of data to use as examples of how the task can be achieved.