About Bryan: Bryan Berend is a Lead Data Scientist at Nielsen, a large consumer and media research company with employees in over 100 countries. He currently lives in Chicago and loves running, cooking, and pub trivia. When you first start learning about data science, one of the first things you learn about are classification algorithms. The concept behind these algorithms is pretty simple: take some information about a data point and place the data point in the correct group or class. A good example is the email spam filter.

Machine learning represents a paradigm shift in programming, there's no doubt. The concept has begun to weave its promising tendrils through everything from Facebook's image software to Gmail's spam filter, but a crafty engineer thought up a better use: a real-life sorting hat inspired by the character in J.K. Rowlings's beloved Harry Potter series. The impetus for project lead Ryan Anderson, a tech hobbyist by night and a solutions architect for IBM by day, was a creation that would entertainingly instill in a young audience the importance of math, technology, and science. "I was thinking of fun projects and, coincidentally, I have a couple of daughters, and they are mad keen on'Harry Potter,'" he told Tech Insider. "They've read the books, like, five times."

The Sorting Hat is no longer confined to fiction – a solutions architect for IBM Watson has developed a real-life version of the all-knowing Harry Potter artefact. Powered by multiple Watson services, the hat was trained to sort the wearer into one of the four Hogwarts'Houses' based on distinctive character traits. The researchers have added animatronics to the design to bring their sorting hat to life, including a voice, a moving mouth, and colour-changing LED eyes, and the smart hat has even tested its abilities by sorting the presidential candidates. The Sorting Hat is no longer confined to fiction – a solutions architect for IBM Watson has developed a real-life version of the all-knowing Harry Potter artefact. Powered by multiple Watson services, the hat was trained to sort the wearer into one of the four Hogwarts'Houses' Anderson and his daughter trained the hat to sort people among the four Hogwarts Houses.