Source: indiatoday.in
It is surprising how much can the world change in a few years. Today, machines can see (a field popularly known as Computer Vision), they can hear (Hi Alexa!) and understand our language (field called Natural Language Processing) to a good degree. And they are only going to get better from here.
On some specific tasks, machines actually perform better than humans. This includes identifying objects in images or doing video surveillance without getting tired. We have seen drastic improvements in virtual assistants, chatbots or use of voice based systems for customer service.
If these developments make you wonder what is driving these changes then you are not alone. All of these developments have been fueled by the power of Data Science. Data Science is nothing but the science of extracting insights from data. With ongoing digitalization, dropping storage costs and increasing compute power, the barriers to use Data Science have come down significantly in the last decade.
Some of the latest developments in Data Science:
1. Machine Learning – Machine Learning is a field in Data Science where we train machines to find patterns and insights on its own and then use that to solve problems for us.
For example, using data to identify which customers are likely going to churn in next 3 months based on latest insights from data is an example of machine learning.
2. Deep Learning – Deep Learning is a special class of machine learning algorithms, which were inspired by how the human brain works. Deep learning has made a significant impact on several real life problems and we are already using it in a lot of products we use on a day to day basis.
For example, text prediction in smartphones to Gmail, or cameras identifying faces by themselves is driven by deep learning.
3. Natural Language Processing – Algorithms which helps machine understand human language and what we mean are part of techniques commonly known as Natural Language Processing. This helps news companies to create summaries of articles to tracking customer sentiment on social media.
4. Computer Vision – Videos and images are nothing but a different form of data. Algorithms which work to help machines see and interpret images (and videos) are popularly known as computer vision. Detecting workers without proper safety gear in a manufacturing plant is an example of computer vision.
Now, a lot of these techniques have been around for some time. But when these techniques are supplied with large amounts of data and compute power, magic starts to happen. This is why we are seeing a whole new set of applications / software becoming smart and changing user experience.
The impact from these technologies increases significantly when we combine these fields to create complex and automated systems. These systems can perform all those tasks which were historically associated with humans.
The coming decade
In the coming decade, we will see a whole range of new products which will increasingly do work we believed only humans could do for a long time. This is liberating for some of us and also challenging for a lot of us as new applications would improve our lives, but at the same point there will also be job replacements at a large scale.
But whatever happens, one thing is for sure that the coming decade is going to be exciting and Data Science will be fuelling the future for the coming years!