Inner Circle Podcast: Episode 007 – Daniel Miessler Demystifies Machine Learning

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Android | RSS

My guest for this episode of the Inner Circle podcast is Daniel Miessler, Director of Advisory Services for IOActive. Daniel presented a session at IOAsis a few weeks ago while we were in San Francisco attending the RSA Conference. I was not able to attend, but the session title–“Machine Learning Demystified: Separating the Magic from Marketing”–piqued my interest.

If you read through enough tech and security vendor websites and it will quickly feel like the whole world revolves around machine learning (or ML) and machine learning and machine learning algorithms are magic technologies that are going to transform the whole world. That is true to some extent, but there’s also a lot out there about ML that is either exaggerated or just plain false. There is also a fair amount of confusion and misperception about what machine learning is or isn’t, and how it is different from and/or works with artificial intelligence.

There are a number of things machine learning is great at, and a few that it is uniquely suited to fundamentally change the way we process and leverage data. The challenge for businesses and consumers, though, is how to see through buzzwords and marketing spin and figure out which companies or products are actually doing something worthwhile with ML. Daniel provides a set of key questions you can use to quickly separate the snake oil from the real deal.