Chapter 2. Let's Help Machines Learn

Machine learning, when you first hear it, sounds more like a fancy word from a sci-fi movie than the latest trend in the tech industry. Talk about it to people in general and their responses are either related to being generally curious about the concept or being cautious and fearful about intelligent machines taking over our world in some sort of Terminator-Skynet way.

We live in a digital age and are constantly presented with all sorts of information all the time. As we will see in this and the coming chapters, machine learning is something that loves data. In fact, the recent hype and interest in this field has been fueled by not just the improvements in computing technology but also due to exponential growth in the amount of data being generated every second. The latest numbers stand at around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day (that's 2.5 followed by 18 zeroes)!

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Fun Fact: More than 300 hours of video data is uploaded to...