User:WillWare/DMLApplicationsIntro

These topics illustrate some of the range of applications to which this field has been applied, and some of the motivation for work in the field.

Recommendation engines have been put to profitable use, particularly by Amazon. Initially developed in the mid-1990s, they have since become common. These are explicit recommendations, provided directly by users.

Collaborative filtering represents an implicit sort of recommendation, inferred from patterns in user data.

The applicability of natural language processing has been growing steadily in recent years. Natural language systems now facilitate international business and news reporting.

Machine assistance in clinical medicine has grown more slowly. Early limited successes with machine diagnosis of human disease have not readily generalized, and human doctors remain the cost-effective means to provide medical care. It's not clear at this point whether there will be some future time when machine diagnosis systems gain traction.