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AnonTechie writes:

Microsoft will soon offer a service aimed at making machine-learning technology more widely usable. "We want to bring machine learning to many more people," Eron Kelly, Microsoft corporate vice president and director SQL Server marketing, said of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, due to be launched in beta form in July. "The line of business owners and the marketing teams really want to use data to get ahead, but data volumes are getting so large that it is difficult for businesses to sift through it all," Kelly said. An offshoot of artificial intelligence, machine learning uses algorithms so that computers recognize behavior in large and streaming data sets. It can be superior to traditional forms of business intelligence in that it offers a way to predict future events and behavior based on past actions.

Refined in academia over the past several decades, machine learning is starting to catch on for business uses such as credit card fraud detection. Microsoft uses the technology to refine its Cortana personal phone assistant, as well as to plan how much hardware it will need to continue to build its Azure hosted computer services.

OK, so it perhaps has a role to play in business - but how can we use similar technology to improve the things that we do? Any ideas?