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How Machine Learning Ate Microsoft
snydeq writes Yesterday's announcement of Azure Machine Learning offers the latest sign of Microsoft's deep machine learning expertise — now available to developers everywhere, InfoWorld reports. "Machine learning has infiltrated Microsoft products from Bing to Office to Windows 8 to Xbox games. Its flashiest vehicle may be the futuristic Skype Translator, which handles two-way voice conversations in different languages. Now, with machine learning available on the Azure cloud, developers can build learning capabilities into their own applications: recommendations, sentiment analysis, fraud detection, fault prediction, and more. The idea of the new Azure offering is to democratize machine learning, so you no longer need to hire someone with a doctorate to use a machine learning algorithm."
Ate or Aid?
... this is just their latest way to get their hands on your data.
So how did MS apply "machine learning" to make Bing not suck? By holding an internal competition to see who's algorithm processed "user improvement program" data best. So that essentially meant training it up to match Google search results (and presumably, which links "consenting" users clicked).
(OK, I'm sure they've come a long way since then on their own merits, but we can't let them live that one down ;-)
"recommendations, sentiment analysis, fraud detection, fault prediction, and more."
I'll never get a job again if they use that in interviews.
Baing about to finish a PhD this is worrying thinking that the deep understanding of a technique can be replaced by a well programmed API. But of course managerial people, a.k.a decission makers will eat that raw. If you want my data just ask for it.
I foresee a bright future where lots of correlations will be found. Without "a PhD" or someone who knows what they are doing ALL software is worthless.
"so you no longer need to hire someone with a doctorate to use a machine learning algorithm"
Unless you actually want that someone to actually know what they are doing, e.g., to know that there's no one-size-fits-all "machine learning"...
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Bob set machine learning back a century.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
If machine learning is such a great thing, why is Microsoft giving it away? It probably hired dozens of machine learning PhDs from top schools, used their insights in its product designs and made a colossal failures out of them. Now their thinking goes, "If machine learning lured us in and fooled us, may be our competitors also would be lured in, made fools of and waste their resources here, and they will pay us a fee to use Azure! win-win!"
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Microsoft should temper the learning machine cleverness. As someone may ask the machine one day: "which company having a quasi monopoly, is involved in bribery scandals, astroturfing, paid false product reviews and comparisons, ... ?"
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Did Bing suck. I did the Bing vs. Google head to head test about 18 month back a few times. (looks like it might still be online at: http://www.bingiton.com/ And I most typically scored 3-Google, 2-Bing with often Bing having some interesting results Google didn't have. For example Bing tends to do better in hitting a better diversity of current information. Bing may be a bit behind possibly and I'm not even comfortable saying that, but sucks no.
.
A month or so ago, I had some issues with Microsoft's Bing bot not following the directions contained in my robots.txt file. When I sent an email in to the BingBot support address, the first reply I got back was that Microsoft considered my robots.txt instructions an "ideal" not something that has to be followed.
I pushed back and finally got someone who understand the purpose of robots.txt. That person told me to put a work-around into place, probably because Microsoft had no intention of fixing their bot to follow the robots.txt rules.
What was interesting about the whole series of email conversations was that the first "person" who answered my email did not seem to be a person at all. It just felt as if I was getting a reply from a email-bot.
The email-bot had some things right in its attempt to seem human --- (*) it first tried to push my support request aside, (*) when I didn't comply with that, it effectively told me to pound sand, (*) when I objected to that, it allowed me to bump up my request to a higher tier of support.
This AI machine first has to be able to throw a chair before it can take over Microsoft.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
it's bullshit. they're not "democratizing" anything, because selling a product and democracy are completely unrelated.
the word they should have used was "commercialise". or perhaps "commoditise". either of those are far more appropriate in that context, and actually make sense.
but they sound like grubby self-centred commercialism in comparison to something noble and uplifting like democratise.
HAL: I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours.
I spent sometime at my storage area recently, going through old paper work and history. Not wanting to take anything with me I took photos of the papers of interest as normally do.
These were legal papers and stuff involving my sons mom when he was much younger. You know the normal break up, the family court, and false accusation, normal stuff.
Making sure that the photos were saved as they weren't the day before (and 4.2.2) -that night I was updated to (5.0 Lollipop) very nice OS. I had a hard time seeing that they made it, till I came across a directory using the name of my son, and all of the photos had been sent to it.
Now I didn't make that directory; 5.0 did on it's own, I figure it had read (scanned) the text and not having her as a contact had somehow not only found him but related the two placing them in a dir of the name used on his contact. Talk about your recognition (learning) software, I imagine some/most made it to google (as in Google voice, you do allow it. I have never nor plan on syncing my phones with any service, or even used software to transfer music, photos, text to my computer so no other "help" do this.
Now that's kissed, anybody seeing how else it could of been done, I'm game for a second opinion. I can't see where his name was ever on one of this papers I haven't checked for that just but can't remember any involved him, -but had to of; recognition yes, phsycic no.
This could really bother some people, it just amazed me.
PhD in machine learning or ...:
secretaries - because we can all do our own docs
car repair mechanics - because it's really just about replacing modules or the whole car
architects - because there's lots of free 3-D drawing apps out there
carpenters - because, hey, how hard is it to nail wood together
lawyers - because just a little reading and memorization will tell you what you need to know
engineers - because they're like carpenters, only with metal and bigger things
programmers - because anyone can learn 'hello world', and it doesn't get much harder than that.
And so on. But remember, you get what you pay for.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.