How Nature Provides a Model for Machine Learning

The Madison Central Library in Wisconsin is hosting a series of talks on current tech topics as part of its Codecinella/Women In Tech event. The next scheduled talk, titled ‘Machine Learning Algorithms Inspired by Nature, should be particularly interesting for anyone intrigued by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), which have a number of exciting applications in modern software development.

The talk will be hosted by Naveen VK, Technical Director at nvisia and veteran software developer in JavaScript, .NET, and other frameworks. In this talk, attendees will be introduced to how machine learning algorithms are inspired by the behavior of plants and animals found in nature, referencing real-life examples and use cases for ML derived from observations of the natural world. The goal is to give attendees an idea of how machine learning has evolved, and how it might develop from here.

Much of AI research has to do with teaching a computer how to interact with the real world. For example, in spatial computing, robots and appliances need to be able to sense and react to objects and environments around them, just as natural living beings do. Machine learning is a technique for computers to mimic what organisms learn through natural selection and experience. For example, a large amount of self-driving cars would create considerable traffic, and ML tools, such as particle swarm optimization, that are based on the mass movement of animals, such as flocks of birds, schools of fish, and swarms of bees, have been developed for this purpose. So-called genetic algorithms have also been modeled on the process of cell reproduction in the survival-of-the-fittest phenomenon of natural selection.

Interested parties can attend in person in the First Floor Conference Room of the Madison Central Library or join in online via Zoom from 6.15 p.m. on October 19.

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