Machine Learning: Why Now? Your questions answered here and #StrataHadoop

Machine learning is not new. SAS has been doing it for over 20 years and some early machine learning papers date back to the 50's. So why is it one of the hottest topics at the Strata Hadoop World conference later this week? Clearly, Hadoop is playing a major role in the increased focus on machine learning. Powerful, low-cost distributive computing environments coupled with Hadoop give data scientists the ability to run iterative models (like neural networks) they may not have been able to in the past.