Machine learning will bolster human expertise in every industry

Pattern recognition is identified as a key human skill that has supported the rise of people to become the dominant species. However, there are limits to this crucial ability, especially when confronted with masses of information that differ only slightly. Small, but significant, variations are more easily recognised by machines that can minutely inspect and compare differences without fatigue and with low margins of error. Humans are, thus, using machines to augment their pattern-recognition capability by teaching machines how to recognise patterns and correlate seemingly disparate data to gain new insights. "Specialised machine-learning algorithms are used to evaluate large quantities of data and derive and/or exploit relationships in the data," says IBM Watson Advanced Cognitive Technology and Solutions data scientist Stefan van der Stockt. "The basic idea behind machine learning is that we want to learn relationships and corelationships between the different elements of the data, whether it be recognising a face or identifying a potentially cancerous lesion on an X-ray image," says Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Mobile Intelligent Autonomous Systems unit principal researcher Dr Benjamin Rosman.