Bringing Machine Learning to your iOS Apps

Today we're going to talk about bringing machine learning to your iOS apps. This is a topic that was really big in WWDC 2017, which was a little bit unexpected – I thought there would just be a couple updates, but I'm sure you've been hearing about machine learning already a lot this week. I'm an iOS developer at SoundCloud in Berlin and I have a background in math and CS. I studied a little bit of machine learning in college but nothing too substantial that was practical, so I had to relearn pretty much everything when I got back into ML recently. So what is machine learning? Probably all of you know what it is at this point, but just in case, in a nutshell it's enabling machines to learn like babies. Instead of explicitly telling the machine what you want it to do, the machine should infer this over time based on different ways of modeling. Arthur Samuel, who was an AI pioneer, defined it as the field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. A very simple machine learning problem would be image classification.