Microsoft To Launch Machine Learning Service

angry tapir (1463043) writes Microsoft will soon offer a service aimed at making machine-learning technology more widely usable. "We want to bring machine learning to many more people," Eron Kelly, Microsoft corporate vice president and director SQL Server marketing, said of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, due to be launched in beta form in July. "The line of business owners and the marketing teams really want to use data to get ahead, but data volumes are getting so large that it is difficult for businesses to sift through it all," Kelly said. The service will have "...an interface called the Machine Learning Studio. The palette includes visual icons for some of the most commonly used machine-learning algorithms, allowing the user to drag and drop them into a visually depicted workflow." Algorithms themselves are implemented in R, which the user of the service can use directly as well.

You want machine learning? You want IBM's Watson.

[mmell]

That machine wasn't merely a decision engine or a huge database - it was a learning system which was given a few months to learn all it could on a broad variety of subjects by crawling the internet. It wasn't programmed with rules to pair an answer with the correct question; it was a system which "learned" how to associate concepts. It was programmed to permit it to weigh its questions against how well they correlated to the answers - to determine a confidence level - but it wasn't specifically programmed to devise questions associated with answers. That's why the next publicly stated idea for the system was in medical diagnostics. It's another area where the ability to relate multiple seemingly disparate items of information with a non-static data store seemed to be of value.

Giving the right programming, it might even hold a conversation better than a 13 year old Ukrainian boy.