Author Archives: baihao luo

If we search for news about Artificial intelligence (AI), a concept of a machine that can think and act like a human, we can find many pieces of relevant news which mention machine learning and deep learning as well. What are the relationships between machine learning, deep learning, and AI? This blog post addresses this question.

Artificial Intelligence: A machine with human intelligence

There are many definitions of AI, and it primarily refers to technologies which make a machine think and act like a human. Using AI applications in our daily life is normal and common: When you are at work, you can tell Siri, an AI voice assistant, to add an event to your calendar; when you return home, you can tell Amazon Echo to play music for you. However, there are still many limitations of AI applications which prevent AI applications from solving very complex problems. Machine learning is a method that humans can use to make AI capable of performing like a human.

Machine learning: A machine learns and acts based on data

Machine learning is the concept that a computer can learn from some given data and draw conclusions. A computer with human intelligence should be able to learn how to do something instead of being programmed to do so. The concept is simple, but how do we help a machine to learn? To answer this question, scientists have designed machine learning algorithms which allow machines to analyze data and find an optimized method to solve a problem. These algorithms include neural networks, decision tree learning, support vector machines, etc.

Deep learning: A neural network with deep layers

“Neural Network : basic scheme with legends” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0

A neural network is the fundamental of deep learning. According to the graph above, there are some cells in a neural network. Each cell is a function that takes in some input data and produces an output. A neural network is a computation system that computes results by chaining a lot of cells together. In order to solve a complex problem efficiently, we want to divide this complex question into small questions, and solve each small question using a set of cells. Each cell set is known as a layer. Deep learning is the idea of designing different layers and organizing them into one large-scale neural network. There are many things we can do using deep learning; check out the video below for some examples.

Video: “Use Cases – Ep. 12 (Deep Learning SIMPLIFIED)” by DeepLearning.TV Source: youtube.com

Conclusion

Original drawing by Baihao Luo

To sum up, machine learning is a subset of AI while deep learning is a subset of machine learning. Machine learning is one of the methods to accomplish AI which enables a machine to learn and act on given data. Deep learning is an algorithm to help a machine learn from data using large-scale neural networks.

-Baihao Luo