Machine Learning - Moin Mr. Robot

Machine Learning - Moin Mr. Robot

Hello moinworld community! My name is Milica. By education and training I am a structural biologist. During my PhD I became aware of lack of basic IT education and experienced its crippling disadvantages. I have joined moinworld in February 2018 in order to broaden my IT skills and help close the gender gap in the IT. As a first course offered was Machine Learning. With a bit of self-taught Python programming, a desire to get to know moinworld team and community better, and a whole lot of faith, I signed up for the course.

What does it mean when machines learn?

If you do not know what Machine Learning is, welcome to the club. I also thought it was some sci-fi abracadabra, something that tech companies with a lot of money, the military or NASA do in their high-tech, spacey labs. But when I read that that’s how Google or Yahoo can suggest similar adds and pages to you, based on what you search for, or how Amazon can make your shopping experience more personal (which is one way to look at it) – Machine Learning didn’t seem so foreign anymore. As a matter of fact, I wanted to know and understand how these algorithms work, and who knows, maybe even one day, be able to write one (gasp).

Me bringing my machine to learn

So I decided I will take on this challenge. What I anticipated as a worst case scenario is: I come out of a Machine Learning course after two hours without having understood a single thing. What actually happened is: I went out of my comfort zone and entered a place where miracles happen: The basic principle of K Nearest Neighbor (KNN) Algorithm was well explained by Efrat - our instructor - on a simple example of classification of flowers. Many statistics concepts are at the base of Machine Learning which make the subject almost relatable, because you get a feeling you have already heard most of the material on some level, and it is indeed not all sci-fi abracadabra.

The mind blowing factor of Machine Learning

The mind blowing factor of Machine Learning comes from an exceptionally creative combination of statistical and mathematical methods with vast amount of data and new computing architectures. After 4x2 hour sessions of Machine Learning, I was left wanting to know and to be able to do more, so when the DeepLearning and TensorFlow was announced, I welcomed the opportunity to dive deeper into this topic.

That is one of the amazing things about moinworld – it brings topics that seam so complex, foreign and intimidating, like Blockchain and Machine Learning, puts them into a non-threatening, familiar environment and allows you to learn at your own pace without expectations or judgment. Even though I still can not write a program which learns from your google search and suggests pages, I still want to and what is even more important, I think that I can. Thank you Efrat and moinworld for this newly-installed confidence!

by Milicia Bajagic you can connect with her via Linkedin .

Follow our social channels to stay updated about our new offerings regarding Machine Learning if you are interested in experimenting yourself!