Digital Data Forgetting Using Machine Learning (Rather Machine Unlearning!

These days data is the new oil in Computer Science! We are producing more and more data every day
and this means that we are fast running out of places to store the data! Regular software systems cannot
handle Big Data and while Cloud Computing is very helpful, the overall costs to manage large amounts of
data are insane!

And so, there are some times when it is much more beneficial than some data is conveniently forgotten
by the system. This can occur in situations when organizations want to control their data related
expenditure or maybe when users want their data and lineage forgotten by the system because of
privacy risks and so on. In such situations, it is better to use Machine Learning to thoroughly understand
the scenarios and identify the unnecessary data so it can be deleted or rather forgotten (In other words
Machine Unlearning!).

2. Interoperability among Neural Networks

Artificial Neural Networks are a part of Machine Learning that are inspired by, amazingly enough,
biological neural networks (So we were inspired by ourselves basically!!!) But one of the major
challenges in creating Artificial Neural Networks is choosing the right framework for them. And Data
scientists are spoiled for choice among various options like PyTorch, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, Apache
MXNet, TensorFlow, etc.

But the problem is that once a Neural Network is trained and evaluated on a particular framework, it is
extremely difficult to port this on a different framework. This somewhat diminishes the far-reaching
capabilities of Machine Learning. So to handle this problem, AWS, Facebook and Microsoft have
collaborated to create the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX), which allows for the reuse of trained
neural network models across multiple frameworks. Now ONNX will become an essential technology
that will lead to increased interoperability among Neural Networks.

3. Automated Machine Learning

For those who are not experts in the mysterious world of Machine Learning, Automated Machine
Learning is godsent! It allows the application of Machine Learning solutions much easier for ML non-
experts and may even be able to easily handle the complex scenarios in training ML models.
So a tool like AutoML which can be used to train high-quality custom machine learning models while
having minimal machine learning expertise will surely gain prominence. It can easily deliver the right
amount of customization without a detailed understanding of the complex workflow of Machine
Learning. However, AutoML is not a silver bullet and it can require some additional parameters that can
only be set with some measure of expertise. (So you will have to learn some Machine Learning!)

4. The convergence of Internet of Things and Machine Learning

Machine Learning and the Internet of Things is like a match made in Tech Heaven!!! According to
Business Insider, there will be more than 64 billion IoT devices by 2025, up from about 9 billion in 2017.
All these IoT devices generate a lot of data that needs to be collected and mined for actionable results.
Now, this requires the expertise of advanced Machine Learning models that are based on deep neural
networks.

So the Internet of Things is used to collect and handle the huge amount of data that is required by the
ML algorithms. In turn, these algorithms convert the data into useful actionable results that can be
implemented by the IoT devices. This convergence of IoT and ML can transform industries and help them
in making more informed decisions based on the mammoth data available every day which will result in
new value propositions, business models, revenue streams and services.

5. Rise Of Natural Language Processing for Customer Support

It’s obvious that humans can converse with each other using speech but now machines can too! This is
known as Natural Language Processing where machines analyze and understand language and speech as
it is spoken (Now if you talk to a machine it may just talk back!). And now NLP is extremely popular for
customer support applications, particularly the chatbot. These chatbots use ML and NLP to interact with
the users in textual form and solve their queries. So you get the human touch in your customer support
interactions without ever directly interacting with a human.

And that’s not all! NLP and ML are also invaluable in actually parsing through different conversations and
understanding what the users are saying. This allows the company to acquire strategic information about
the users such as their preferences, buying habits, sentiments, etc. which can then be analyzed to
understand market trends, operational risks, etc