US intelligence group seeks Machine Learning breakthroughs
From the post:
Machine Learning technology is found in everything from spam detection programs to intelligent thermostats, but can the technology make a huge leap to handle the exponentially larger amounts of information and advanced applications of the future?
Researchers from the government’s cutting edge research group, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), certainly hope so and this week announced that they are looking to the industry for new ideas that may become the basis for cutting edge Machine Learning projects.
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From IARPA: The focus of our request for information is on recent advances toward automatic machine learning, including automation of architecture and algorithm selection and combination, feature engineering, and training data scheduling for usability by non-experts, as well as scalability for handling large volumes of data. Machine Learning is used extensively in application areas of interest including speech, language, vision, sensor processing and the ability to meld that data into a single, what IARPA calls multi-modal system.
“In many application areas, the amount of data to be analyzed has been increasing exponentially (sensors, audio and video, social network data, web information) stressing even the most efficient procedures and most powerful processors. Most of these data are unorganized and unlabeled and human effort is needed for annotation and to focus attention on those data that are significant,” IARPA stated.
This could be interesting, depending on how you developed the interface. What if the system actually learned from its users while it was being used? So that not only did it provide faster access to more accurate information, it “learned” how to better do its job from the analysts using the software.
Especially if part of that “learning” was on what basis to merge information from disparate sources.
Note: Responses to the RFI are due by 27 January 2012.