Ask a Data Scientist: What's Machine Learning?

For as popular as the term "machine learning" has come to be, it's surprising to me how often it's equated to robots taking over the world. Phrases like "neural nets" and "deep learning" tap into our sense of fantasy, but when we jump from new tech to robot takeover, we miss the beauty and power of what machine learning actually is, and the groundbreaking new developments that are pushing industries forward. With this in mind, I sat down with our team's data scientist, Hillary Green-Lerman, to shed light on the buzzword. I asked the questions Wikipedia failed to fully answer: what is machine learning, who should be learning it and how soon can I visit Westworld? "Machine Learning is about using the data you already have to make predictions. This sounds really fancy, but most of the time, the'prediction' is really just a label," Hillary told us.