13 ms·
Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for?
What real-world applications are you finding it useful for right now?
- sulexk 9y agoBuilding a smart home security system, so you can be notified when your friends have arrived, or if someone is trying to break into your home. Machine learning is very useful here, as you can train the system to recognise what your friends look like, or what a break-in might look like.
- LaurensBER 9y agoHow do you collect training data for break-ins? Did you put an add out on craigslists requesting for people to attempt it or do you have some criminal connections?
- tobltobs 9y agoHow do you get the data for training how a break-in looks like?
- marsRoverDev 9y agoCouldn't you just train it on genuine visitors and then use the probability of it being a genuine visitor to determine whether it is a break in?
- kmmlng 9y agoI imagine only training on genuine visitors would be tricky with any traditional classification approach. Even having a 90/10% split of positive/negative training data is difficult since a lot of classifiers will just degrade to a majority vote. Maybe a Restricted Boltzmann Machine or something similar?
- headcanon 9y agopossibly some kind of anomaly detection, but I'm not sure how you would model the data.
- network_ops 9y agoI'm guessing this would also use data for time of day, and if anyone is at home
- adictator 9y agoNot me, but a friend of mine heads a company that uses drones to identify defects / damage on containers. He uses ML to process the images captured by the drones, which is fed through an ML processor to detect such damages & flag them for insurance claims purposes.
- KhalilK 9y agoNot ML per se but ANN have proven to be quite useful in tumor growth modeling. I am using them to model cancerous cells' genotype.
- ashark 9y agoI use it as something to worry about not knowing how to use, and how that might make me unemployable in a few years, while also having no obvious need for it at all, and therefore no easy avenue towards learning it, especially since it requires math skills which have completely rusted over because I also never need those, so I'd have to start like 2 levels down the ladder to work my way back up to it. I've found it very effective in the role of "source of general, constant, low-level anxiety".
- geff82 9y agoI feel with you :D
- muricula 9y agoMachine learning is very good at solving certain types of problems -- classification being chief among them. I think the current hype is a little overblown. Yeah, great scientific advancements have been made, but that doesn't mean"AI" is about to replace all programmers. It's just another family of algorithms we have in our toolbox for when we need them.
- cr0sh 9y agoML can certainly do continuous problems as well, but for many problems, classification works well to solve them. Plus, most problems can be devolved to classification, and classification problems can usually be solved by simpler "classic statistical" methods (regression methods), so are easy and fast to code for (no need for any fancy neural network or deep learning or such, or massive datasets). I don't think ML or AI (or whatever you want to call it) is going to replace programmers any time soon, either. I do think, though, that having the skills in such domains will be something that employers are going to look at in differentiating potential candidates for job placements. So if you have the knowledge or can get it now, it may prove useful in the future.
- muricula 9y agoI agree that ML knowledge useful and differentiating, but I don't think it justifies the level of dread of the parent comment.
- muricula 9y agoDetecting malware. https://www.barkly.com/product https://www.barkly.com/product
- blackbear_ 9y agopredicting the evolution of running cases, and the arrival of new cases, for capacity planning in a call center
- GFischer 9y agoDo you believe ML is adding value there (instead of a standard prediction/forecasting model)?
- Just1689 9y agoAutomatically answering HR queries worded in different ways
- dotancohen 9y agoDifferent ways of wording automated HR answers.
- alexcnwy 9y agoAutomatic text summarization.
- gerenuk 9y agoMind sharing which algorithm you are using?
- leanthebean 9y agoI'm a complete novice in ML and I've been looking for something like this for awhile - would you mind sharing your process on how you did this?
- phillc73 9y agoClassifying future elite race horses, before they've raced.[1][2] I didn't develop the original approach but am involved in working to improve the predictive outcomes. [1] https://www.breezeupiq.com https://www.breezeupiq.com [2] http://www.performancegenetics.com http://www.performancegenetics.com
- braindead_in 9y agoPredicting mistakes made by humans during audio/video transcription, giving them auto-complete suggestions, classifying severity of changes, predicting the difficulty level based on audio characteristics.
- cl0wnshoes 9y agoUse it in my software engineer screening service to determine if a user should answer more questions on a particular topic and dive deeper into a particular subject. Using Azure ML, been working out well so far. Went from messing around for days with other ML libraries to up and running within 20 minutes on Azure.
- highd 9y ago-Customer analysis / clustering / behavior visualization -Financials analysis / predictions -Image classification
- danvoell 9y agobump on this one. - Sales Promotion/Offer Prediction - Customer Analysis / Clustering / Site Content Display
- highd 9y agoI've got a client that's wrangling their data into a place where I can do some targeting for upselling, end-to-end - I'm really looking forward to that. Lots of value on the table, IMO, and really interesting and unusual datasets.
- brettz 9y agoDetecting what pornstars, actions, production and categories appear in 5mil+ adult videos.
- jmstfv 9y agoI use Stanford NER to extract book titles and authors from HN comments. Previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14202557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14202557
- wyldfire 9y agoHow do you disambiguate similar/identical titles? Did you evaluate other NER against CoreNLP? e.g. how does spacy compare? EDIT: answering my own question -- research here [1] ranks CoreNLP as the winner among CoreNLP, NLTK, spaCy, Lingpipe but AFAICT spaCy is competitive. [1] https://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W16/W16-2703.pdf https://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W16/W16-2703.pdf
- jmstfv 9y agoI found spacy's documentation lacking in details on how to train NER from scratch (at least I couldn't make sense of it). That's why I decided to stick with Stanford's NER. Regarding disambiguation: People usually mention books with their respective authors, so it takes one query against the local database to check whether entity is indeed a particular book by a particular author. When no author is mentioned, I check parent comment (if any) to find if the given book is mentioned there. Well, and if comment turns out to be standalone then I query Goodreads / Google Books API. Given books with identical titles, these APIs return the most popular option.
- cmsimike 9y agoI am just getting into it, but I am primarily looking at it because I have about 8 months worth of home automation sensor data stored in a MySQL database thanks to my home automation software (thanks home-assistant!) and I want to see if ML can look at patterns from that sensor data and infer what to do in my apartment. For instance when I get home (gps sensor) and when I open my front door (door binary sensor), can a system understand that I typically turn my TV on when that happens?
- fredley 9y agoPredicting day-to-day harvest yields of perishable fruit, like Strawberries.
- klancaster 9y agoWe analyze images of skin lesions and give a probability whether they are malignant melanoma. The analysis is performed on-board on mobile phones.
- thenaturalist 9y agoHey, sounds interesting. Would you share the name of your company/ startup?
- klancaster 9y agoAt this point, it is university research. The work has been published, and we are in clinical trials in prep for commercialization.
- lj3 9y agoIs this just for melanoma, or has it expanded into pap smear and bronch territory? My mother's a cytotech and every couple of years somebody claims they're going to replace her with a shell script. Hasn't happened yet, though.
- klancaster 9y agoWe are expanding it to a number of skin and ocular diseases.
- jboogie77 9y agoDo you mind sharing a link to the research?
- zfran 9y agodo you worry about the weights of your net being stolen off the app through reverse engineering?
- klancaster 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bitL 9y ago(In progress) Automate e-commerce business completely, including customer/supplier e-mail responses, voice communication, identifying data structure of supplier feeds and performing automated conversion between formats for integration, sales estimation, hidden platform variables identification (how to win a buy box?), price competition etc. Tech based on Python, DL (Keras), RNN, GAN, SVM, decision trees etc.
- nowarninglabel 9y agoChecking for issues with loan photos as they are posted. It's been interesting to find that many ML platforms and libraries don't do a great job of recognizing humans with dark skin. Hopefully, by adding Kiva's 1 mil+ images to the mix we can give them a better basis point to learn from. Hoping to use it for a lot of other things as well, but we're still getting to know how to leverage it.
- jedberg 9y agoThat's a great insight to use Kiva as training data, because I agree that not recognizing dark skinned people is a huge problem with current facial recognition datasets. This will get worse as more retail establishments use image recognition in their every day operation.
- jedberg 9y agoI'm not using it at this moment, but in a couple of weeks I'll have a newborn, and I was thinking of taking pictures of him every time he is upset, and then tagging the photo with what ends up being the resolution (feed, change, or nap) and seeing if I could build a classifier that could figure out what he needs just from a picture of his angry face. Semi-related, but if anyone is using the AWS tools for their AI, please ping me. I'm looking for a speaker for a community event in SF in June. (contact info in profile)
- pdnell 9y agoSuch a cool use case. I'd love to see the results if you could build a classifier for it, though I do wonder how quickly it could identify the symptom.
- mipmap04 9y agoHey I'm having a newborn as well and wouldn't mind contributing to the sample set if you make a web form or API for me to post to.
- kayoone 9y agoimagine a mobile app that parents can use to identify what their angry new born needs, brilliant :)
- chollida1 9y ago:) I really like the idea and get ready for the excitement of having a family. I think the problem you'll end up having is that in some/most cases you are never really certain what the problem was. Feeding might make the crying stop but you have no way of knowing if the reason for the crying was hunger. Similar problems for sleep, diaper changing, etc. Every time the crying stops you can never be certain if you just made them temporarily forget about the root problem or if you did properly identify the root cause. TL/DR my hypothesis after raising my own kids, is that the data will be almost all noise with very little perceptible signal.
- jedberg 9y agoI already have a kid, so I know how noisy (pun intended) the data can be. I honestly don't expect to work at all, but it will be fun to try!
- eggie5 9y agoForecast loan payment defaults for 90 days or longer, 3 months in advance using a tree based model.
- retube 9y agoWhat's your training set?
- eggie5 9y agopast loan performance data
- lawrenceyan 9y agoLending Club?
- eggie5 9y agohedge fund
- lawrenceyan 9y agoHow large of a dataset are you looking at? I'm curious as to whether Lending Club's publicly available data will be lengthy enough to get meaningful accurate results for general 5-10 year loan predictions. Though it is nice that a economic crash happened to occur in the middle.
- eggie5 9y agoof course more data is always better, but there are plenty of flexible models that can learn form small data, so just try the lending club data and if your model isn't learning anything choose a more flexible one...
- grooling 9y agoVery interesting stuff. Is it just you for personal interest?
- orasis 9y agoEvolving mobile games to discover variants that earn 5 star reviews. Using https://improve.ai https://improve.ai
- eggie5 9y agoRecommender system using visual features
- ollin 9y agoI'm using it to isolate acapellas from music for making mashups/remixes. Not quite "real world" yet, since even my most recent models aren't perfectly reliable, but it's getting there.
- arbesfeld 9y agoDetecting moments of user frustration in web apps (ie. rage clicks, shaking mouse, refreshing the page) https://logrocket.com https://logrocket.com
- CodeSheikh 9y agoReplacing project managers and introducing reward/score based AI bots that keep track of progress of individuals as function of stories they are working on, and these bots send out reminders (slack chat bots perhaps). This will can help improve productivity at large firms with multiple (and sometimes unnecessary) levels of manager hierarchies such as IBM, Dell, HP, oil companies etc. Let's be honest a certain programmer has a pattern with which he/she works. Time spent on a problem, number of initial bugs, number of commits, time spent vs difficulty of a certain problem and so forth. We have all this data to quantify and train a bot. I mean why not :)
- badosu 9y agoThis seems potentially terrifying if it's not able to understand the subtleties of what 'value' means on a project.
- rdrey 9y agoThat sounds a lot like the workflow in Dave Eggers' "The Circle". I think if you read the book you'd be less likely to implement anything like this. :P
- CodeSheikh 9y agoI have been meaning to read that book recommended by a friend working in tech. Apparently there's a movie out now too :)
- lotyrin 9y agoI really wish more quantitative analysis was done in this portion of the field, thank you.
- kentt 9y agoThat would replace less than 1% of what my PM does. But I work for a smaller company so perhaps I don't understand the use case.
- deevin9 9y agoimproving relevancy of search results - http://www.coveo.com/en/platform/machine-learning http://www.coveo.com/en/platform/machine-learning
- wizzerking 9y agoClassification of Contenets Segmentation of MEdical Images Neural Networks can also be used in DeNoising, DeHAzing Super-Resolution
- fcnfan 9y agoI work for a large semiconductor manufacturer. In our R&D operations we require a large volume of newly designed parts to be purchased from suppliers. These parts are not off the shelf but are all custom created by us. Once a design is approved we try to get them into the lab the fastest way possible so the earlier we can get the designs quoted with a supplier, the better. I use machine learning to predict if a newly designed part will have to be purchased soon to go in the lab. That prediction saves me about 3 weeks of lead time to get it to a supplier. Before machine learning, the first time the purchasing department knew that it will need to be purchased is when the designer filled out a form. Now they know as soon as he submits his design and can get a head start.
- adamsea 9y agoThat sounds really interesting. What sort of data do you use to do this?
- zeptomu 9y agoAt my work we use it to do large-scale analysis of remote sensing data, in particular segmentation of satellite imagery to provide land monitoring services.
- leanthonyrn 9y agoI work for a large multi-hospital corporation. We use machine learning to predict the risk of a patient, after an inpatient admission, being readmitted in 30 days post discharge. If the risk is high, we proactively put process in place to reduce the readmission risk.
- jonbaer 9y agoIn search, Learning to Rank is a common application for ML ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_to_rank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_to_rank https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/Learning+To+Rank https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/Learning+To...
- __erik 9y agoWe use ml to identify users who might try to commit fraud when purchasing things from our site, as well as prevent identify fraud when users verify their ID with us. We are also looking into taking advantage of adaptive design to improve ux and conversion.
- orky56 9y agoThere's research about the high frequency of certain digits when bogus accounts are created. I've also done work with KBAs, geo's, and name origins with interesting results. Very exciting area!
- grooling 9y agoInterned at a KYC/KYB company last summer and its all manual there. They've got people checking the submitted forms/scans manually. How good are you getting because I truly believe they can all be replaced very quickly! Talk to me :)
- writeslowly 9y agoI've been working with clustering algorithms to create a personal news aggregator from sitemaps and RSS feeds, using an NLP library (Stanford CoreNLP) to do feature extraction. [1] I'd like to extend it to classify articles into different categories so I could filter things like transcripts, opinion columns, web scrapes gone wrong, but I'm not sure how to set that up yet. [1] Very rough prototype: https://confabulator.io/newsclustering/ https://confabulator.io/newsclustering/
- imwhoopsie 9y agoHi writeslowly, a friend and I are working on a tech investment news aggregator (manually curated right now -- http://circulaat.com http://circulaat.com), and I think your clustering algorithm might be really useful for it. I can't figure out how to DM you via the HackerNews system but would love to get in contact
- writeslowly 9y agoI've added my contact information to my profile. Feel free to email me if you'd like to talk
- greatNespresso 9y agoTrying to predict horse racing
- repied 9y agoIs that working?
- greatNespresso 9y agoI am still lacking data to test it more thoroughly, but as of now it is promising enough for me to keep working on it. And it's a fun way to learn. What do you work on ?
- bbcbasic 9y agoMe too :-)
- greatNespresso 9y agoWhat do you use ? I found out that svc trained with proper data leads to satisfying perf for predicting the four first horses (in disorder though)
- omarforgotpwd 9y agoI run a website called Hey Am I Fat. We've trained a classifier based off a simple softmax regression in TensorFlow that tries to detect whether people are fat or not. If you submit a picture of yourself to HeyAmIFat.com we can tell you if you're fat or not within minutes.
- dominotw 9y agoi think you would get more traction if you had called it doILookFat.com or doesItMakeMyButtLookBig.com . Then automatically find and link to products ( jeans/hairstyle) ect that can improve the situation. make money from product referrals.
- omarforgotpwd 9y agoHahaha, the website was just made as a joke but you're probably right that it could be optimized to get more traction...
- Normal_gaussian 9y agoA nice email / phone capture portal you have there. Does anybody know what the value of such lists are? Having no other information with them I can't imagine it is much.
- agitator 9y ago... Well, you know if they are fat or not. So you can market to people that now want to get fit, with their new found realization that they are fat, or people who want swim suits now knowing that they are fit.
- omarforgotpwd 9y agoI don't store this information after we send the response, but that would be one way to make money if you don't care about being an asshole to your users. This is mostly a joke and I don't make any money from it.
- quadrature 9y agoAt work we're using it to battle fraud, we're also using it to recommend apps and themes to our users and we're using it internally for various forecasting tasks.
- toisanji 9y agoimage processing and effects using deep learning: http://somatic.io http://somatic.io
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- afpx 9y ago* financial forecasting * resource demand forecasting * balancing distributed energy resource loads * automating metadata generation * categorizing 'events' * finding anomalies in satellite data Most important: * running bots on my xbox
- dglass 9y agoI use some basic tf-idf machine learning for clustering similar articles for http://tracket.com http://tracket.com
- nrdwavexe 9y agoFirst of all, suppose we say "tool learning" instead of "machine learning". Next, suppose we view the mind as a collection of automaticities---machines. This means detaching from the image of the self as a unified whole and attaching to the image of the self as a network of activities and processes. Machine learning means I am going to entertain the notion that these mental formations can learn on their own, in other words, that I will give them permission to have their own autonomy. Why would I do that? Why would I give a bunch of paintings in a museum armaments? And freedom of movement? Why would I give mental formations the power to hurt, even kill me? In order to learn, we must first learn to kill the reality in which we cannot learn. I am the thing that creates the reality in which you cannot learn, since if you could, you would learn how to kill me.
- antognini 9y agoWe use it for automated seizure detection in EEG data. Most seizures have no clinical manifestation (e.g., shaking or trembling), and if a seizure goes on too long (~30 minutes) the patient can suffer permanent brain damage or even die. This is particularly problematic for patients in the ICU since they tend to seize silently more often and it isn't easy to tell that they are seizing without having a neurologist examine the EEG data. We also use machine learning for detecting other features of EEG data and removing artifacts. (Eye blinks, for example, cause big artifacts.)
- sevensor 9y agoBurning CPU cycles on an opaque, needlessly complicated model created by a canny professor who realized that putting ML in grant proposals gets you 5x the cash compared to regression.
- froindt 9y agoUnfortunately I bet this will be the case for the next few years until funding agencies figure out not everything has to be done with machine learning.
- mi100hael 9y agoHotdog/Not Hotdog
- kvz 9y agoAt Transloadit we're going to use it for predicting how many machines we'll need to encode incoming video and audio files in near realtime, and then scaling that capacity up in parallel, as files are still being uploaded or imported. Already half a year in the making, but in our early tests it seems we can outperform the custom algorithms we had in place for this, by a lot.
- waterside81 9y agoMultilingual named entity recognition and disambiguation
- dennisgorelik 9y agoWe use machine learning for parsing jobs and resumes and then to match them with each other. To see the results - post your resume here: https://www.postjobfree.com/post-resume https://www.postjobfree.com/post-resume
- arwhatever 9y agoI find it useful for learning 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.
- agibsonccc 9y agoFraud detection (credit cards, online banking) Detecting illegal mining activity via satellite network intrusion (packet analysis) Predicting machine failure Stock market trend prediction (up/down) Simbox fraud Finding similar parts for large vehicles to help engineers I can keep going, but this is a sample I've seen over the years. We mainly do work in time series data for enterprise basically mostly "things google doesn't do". A bulk of what we do doesn't appear in research papers because it's not "GAN art" eg: "the current hype".