User:HobakJoah/Machine learning

History and relationships to other fields
The term machine learning was coined in 1959 by Arthur Samuel, an IBM employee and pioneer in the field of computer gaming and artificial intelligence. The synonym self-teaching computers was also used in this time period.

Although the earliest machine learning model was introduced in the 1950s when Arthur Samuel invented a program that calculated the winning chance in checkers for each side, the history of machine learning roots back to decades of human desire and effort to study human cognitive processes. In 1949, Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, published a book titled The Organization of Behavior where he introduces the Hebbian theory, discussing the neural structure or synapses between the nerve cells. Hebb’s model of neurons interacting with one another sets a groundwork for how AIs and machine learning algorithms work under nodes, or artificial neurons used by computers to communicate data. Other researchers who have studied on human cognitive systems contributed to the modern machine learning technologies as well including logician Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, who proposed the early mathematical models of neural networks to come up with algorithms that mirror human thought processes.

By the early 1960s an experimental "learning machine" with punched tape memory, called Cybertron, had been developed by Raytheon Company to analyze sonar signals, electrocardiograms, and speech patterns using rudimentary reinforcement learning. It was repetitively "trained" by a human operator/teacher to recognize patterns and equipped with a "goof" button to cause it to re-evaluate incorrect decisions. A representative book on research into machine learning during the 1960s was Nilsson's book on Learning Machines, dealing mostly with machine learning for pattern classification. Interest related to pattern recognition continued into the 1970s, as described by Duda and Hart in 1973. In 1981 a report was given on using teaching strategies so that a neural network learns to recognize 40 characters (26 letters, 10 digits, and 4 special symbols) from a computer terminal.

Tom M. Mitchell provided a widely quoted, more formal definition of the algorithms studied in the machine learning field: "A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E." This definition of the tasks in which machine learning is concerned offers a fundamentally operational definition rather than defining the field in cognitive terms. This follows Alan Turing's proposal in his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", in which the question "Can machines think?" is replaced with the question "Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?".

Modern-day machine learning has two objectives, one is to classify data based on models which have been developed, the other purpose is to make predictions for future outcomes based on these models. A hypothetical algorithm specific to classifying data may use computer vision of moles coupled with supervised learning in order to train it to classify the cancerous moles. A machine learning algorithm for stock trading may inform the trader of future potential predictions.

Limitations
Although machine learning has been transformative in some fields, machine-learning programs often fail to deliver expected results. Reasons for this are numerous: lack of (suitable) data, lack of access to the data, data bias, privacy problems, badly chosen tasks and algorithms, wrong tools and people, lack of resources, and evaluation problems.

The "black box theory" poses another yet significant challenge. Black box refers to a situation where the algorithm or the process of producing an output is entirely opaque, meaning that even the coders of the algorithm cannot audit the pattern that the machine extracted out of the data. The House of Lords Select Committee, which claimed that such an “intelligence system” that could have a “substantial impact on an individual’s life” would not be considered acceptable unless it provided “a full and satisfactory explanation for the decisions” it makes.

As an example, in 2018, a self-driving car from Uber failed to detect a pedestrian, who was killed after a collision. Microsoft's chatbot has been reported to produce hostile and offensive response against its users.

Machine learning has been used as a strategy to update the evidence related to a systematic review and increased reviewer burden related to the growth of biomedical literature. While it has improved with training sets, it has not yet developed sufficiently to reduce the workload burden without limiting the necessary sensitivity for the findings research themselves.

Bias
Main article: Algorithmic bias

Machine learning approaches in particular can suffer from different data biases. A machine learning system trained specifically on current customers may not be able to predict the needs of new customer groups that are not represented in the training data. When trained on human-made data, machine learning is likely to pick up the constitutional and unconscious biases already present in society.

For example, an experiment carried out by ProPublica, a predictive policing company, regarding machine learning algorithm’s insight towards the recidivism rates among prisoners falsely flagged “black defendants high risk twice as often as white defendants.” In 2015, Google photos would often tag black people as gorillas, and in 2018 this still was not well resolved, but Google reportedly was still using the workaround to remove all gorillas from the training data, and thus was not able to recognize real gorillas at all. Similar issues with recognizing non-white people have been found in many other systems. In 2016, Microsoft tested a chatbot that learned from Twitter, and it quickly picked up racist and sexist language.

Because of such challenges, the effective use of machine learning may take longer to be adopted in other domains. Concern for fairness in machine learning, that is, reducing bias in machine learning and propelling its use for human good is increasingly expressed by artificial intelligence scientists, including Fei-Fei Li, who reminds engineers that "There's nothing artificial about AI...It's inspired by people, it's created by people, and—most importantly—it impacts people. It is a powerful tool we are only just beginning to understand, and that is a profound responsibility."

Ethics
See also: AI control problem, Toronto Declaration, and Ethics of artificial intelligence

Machine learning poses a host of ethical questions. Systems that are trained on datasets collected with biases may exhibit these biases upon use (algorithmic bias), thus digitizing cultural prejudices. For example, in 1988, the UK's Commission for Racial Equality found that St. George's Medical School had been using a computer program trained from data of previous admissions staff and this program had denied nearly 60 candidates who were found to be either women or had non-European sounding names. Using job hiring data from a firm with racist hiring policies may lead to a machine learning system duplicating the bias by scoring job applicants by similarity to previous successful applicants. A predictive algorithms developed by Geolitica, a predictive policing company, which trained its machine learning model using historical crime data, resulted in “disproportionately high levels of over-policing in low-income and minority communities.”

While responsible collection of data and documentation of algorithmic rules used by a system is considered a critical part of machine learning, some researchers blame lack of participation and representation of minority population in the field of AI for machine learning’s vulnerability to biases. In fact, according to research carried out by the Computing Research Association (CRA) in 2021, “female faculty merely make up 16.1%” of all faculty members who focus on AI among several universities around the world. Furthermore, among the group of “new U.S. resident AI PhD graduates,” 45% identified as white, 22.4% as Asian, 3.2% as Hispanic, and 2.4% as African American, which further demonstrates a lack of diversity in the field of AI.

AI can be well-equipped to make decisions in technical fields, which rely heavily on data and historical information. These decisions rely on objectivity and logical reasoning. Because human languages contain biases, machines trained on language corpora will necessarily also learn these biases.

Other forms of ethical challenges, not related to personal biases, are seen in health care. There are concerns among health care professionals that these systems might not be designed in the public's interest but as income-generating machines. This is especially true in the United States where there is a long-standing ethical dilemma of improving health care, but also increasing profits. For example, the algorithms could be designed to provide patients with unnecessary tests or medication in which the algorithm's proprietary owners hold stakes. There is potential for machine learning in health care to provide professionals an additional tool to diagnose, medicate, and plan recovery paths for patients, but this requires these biases to be mitigated.