The Year in Machine Learning (Part One)

This is the first installment in a three-part review of 2016 in machine learning and deep learning. In Part Two, we cover developments in each of the leading open source machine learning and deep learning projects. Part Three will review the machine learning and deep learning moves of commercial software vendors. As organizations expand the use of machine learning for profiling and automated decisions, there is growing concern about the potential for bias. In 2016, reports in the media documented racial bias in predictive models used for criminal sentencing, discriminatory pricing in automated auto insurance quotes, an image classifier that learned "whiteness" as an attribute of beauty, and hidden stereotypes in Google's word2vec algorithm.