Machine Learning Nears Inflection Point - Markets Media

Although the machine-learning discipline is more than 30 years old, the nascent technology is poised for a serious growth spurt that may put puberty to shame. "As machine learning becomes more mainstream and there's more understanding of how the technology works, I thing we will see exponential growth," said Drew Warren, president and CEO of smart-data processing vendor Recognos Financial. "As organizations' demand increases and grows more powerful, we see more organizations allotting more money to bring its development to the next level." Warren attributes machine learning's increased pace of evolution to better and more abundant enabling technologies, improved performance, and the rise of more specialized vendors that have the potential to reconfigure the technology's linear improvement curve into an exponential one. The advent of open-source resources like Google's TensorFlow machine-learning library has made development much easier, noted Nitin Rakesh, president and CEO of technology and knowledge-processing outsourcing provider Syntel.