Building intelligent machines to transform data into knowledge

In this age of modern technology, there is one resource that we have in abundance: a large amount of structured and unstructured data. In the second half of the twentieth century, machine learning evolved as a subfield of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that involved self-learning algorithms that derived knowledge from data in order to make predictions. Instead of requiring humans to manually derive rules and build models from analyzing large amounts of data, machine learning offers a more efficient alternative for capturing the knowledge in data to gradually improve the performance of predictive models and make data-driven decisions. Not only is machine learning becoming increasingly important in computer science research, but it also plays an ever greater role in our everyday lives. Thanks to machine learning, we enjoy robust email spam filters, convenient text and voice recognition software, reliable web search engines, challenging chess-playing programs, and, hopefully soon, safe and efficient self-driving cars.