
Big data and machine learning - soundsop
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/11/21/big-data-and-machine-learning/
======
recuter
Frankly, I can't tell anymore if the linked article is tongue in cheek. Enough
HN for today.

~~~
theseatoms
It's 8am central and I've already expended my daily buzzword budget.

------
thewarrior
Could anyone explain to me whether this article is serious or sarcasm ?

And if it is sarcastic what exactly is he mocking ?

I guess that most HN readers would be unfamiliar the tools of the trade for
big data and machine learning.

~~~
compbio
Not serious, or maybe ha-ha-only-serious. See:

[http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/ai.text](http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/ai.text)

    
    
      The AI field has been a prolific source of hokey new
      terminology
      ...
      AI is about the same age as the rest of computing.
      ...
      If DOD spending on AI drops far enough, universities   
      like Stanford, MIT and CMU may even find the integrity
      to rid themselves of scientifically embarassing, but 
      formerly profitable, AI programs. The quality of CS 
      faculties and budgets at universities across the  
      country will continue to be diluted by the presence of
      large numbers of AI meatballs. 
      -- Gary Martins (former RAND manager)

------
twelfthnight
"Google is replacing PageRank with RankBrain and when this is complete they
won’t know why certain pages are offered as the best result"

I'm not sure if this will always be true. I think that if we move toward a
sort of neural network programming (1) we won't be able to "know why" in the
sense that we can explain the functions, but will instead explain programs
based on output from the layers and from the relationships between variables.
For instance, deep dream __is a way to understand how google 's image
classifier is "working" (2). It's super interesting that the classifier thinks
that a human arm is part of a dumbbell, for instance.

1) Maybe something like this:
[http://web.mit.edu/~axch/www/art.pdf](http://web.mit.edu/~axch/www/art.pdf).

2) [http://googleresearch.blogspot.ch/2015/06/inceptionism-
going...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.ch/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-
into-neural.html)

------
mkagenius
Don't take away my "for" loop from me.. It is the magical thing that brought
me to computer science :)

------
Jabbles
_Google is replacing PageRank with RankBrain and when this is complete they
won’t know why certain pages are offered as the best results._

Google is well aware of the problems of machine learning:

[http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43146.html](http://research.google.com/pubs/pub43146.html)

------
GFK_of_xmaspast
Kind of weird seeing a Greenspun post where he's not getting all het up about
alimony.

