What’s the next big thing in computing? For those gathering at this week’s Microsoft Research Machine Learning Summit in Paris, it’s computers that understand what they see, translate languages on the fly, and learn from their experiences -- in short, exhibit all the attributes we normally think of as “intelligence.”
Machine learning has been in the works for decades but has recently seen rapid gains, in large part due to big data and other advances. A major breakthrough came late last year when Microsoft Research’s Rick Rashid demonstrated real-time speech translation where his spoken words were converted into computer-generated Chinese language.