Q4 Hackathon Theme: Machine Learning & Data Science

I was dusting off my copy of Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines today, and found a fascinating chart (adapted below). The book was written in 1998; it's interesting to reflect nearly 20 years later we're more or less on schedule. $1000 will buy you an electronic brain with a "thinking" capacity somewhere between a mouse and human.

Apple's release of Core ML in iOS 11, along with the Bionic "Neural Engine", is a sign of things to come. This technology is rapidly becoming commoditized, it's getting easier to use, and it's going to creep into everything.

With machine learning, software can learn how to make decisions from patterns in data. For complex problems, machines trained this way can make more effective decisions than a set of rules explicitly designed by a human programmer. Often, the machine can even make better decisions than a human themselves.

ML will profoundly transform our human experience with computing. And so, on December 7th and 8th, Metal Toad's Q4 Hackathon focus is on Machine Learning and Data Science.