“The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World”

Data is everywhere, and it opened the opportunity for the usage of advanced analytics and data based processes, through Data Science, with the adoption of algorithms, frameworks, technologies based on Machine Learning.

Even, the adoption of ML increased only in the last years, the term was firstly used in 1959 by Arthur Samuel, an IBM employee and pioneer in the field of computer gaming and artificial intelligence.

Companies are increasing and accelerating the adoption of machine learning, using it in different areas such as agriculture, astronomy, banking, health, climate science, etc, in a wide range of applications.

As a data driven company Jumia is also doing a lot of projects of Data Science, lead by Adrien Devaux, in areas such as recommendation, delivery times prediction, and many other applications, supported by other teams namely Data Engineering and Big Data team.

Taking this into consideration, my very first book proposal is: “The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World”, written by Pedro Domingos, and published in 2015.

Pedro Domingos is Portuguese, and he is a Professor Emeritus of University of Washington, in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.

This book was recommended by Bill Gates, as one of the two books that we should all read to understand AI.

“The Master Algorithm” is composed by 10 chapters: The Machine Learning Revolution, The Master Algorithm, Hume’s problem of induction, How does your brain work, Evolution: natures learning algorithm, In the church of Reverend Bayes, You are what you reason, Learning without a teacher, The pieces of the puzzle fall in place, This is the world on Machine Learning.

Pedro Domingos states that “All knowledge — past, present and future — can be deduced from data by a single, universal learning algorithm”. This universal learning algorithm is what the author refers to as The Master Algorithm.

The main approaches in ML are supervised, semi-supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, using algorithms such as Artificial Neural Networks, Random Forests, Regression… So the idea of having an universal learning algorithm is disruptive.

“The Master Algorithm” is a book for anyone, really for anyone. This is an exploration of concepts and ideas that will help you understand what your data is used for and how to better control what you share, and the ones that recently arrived in the field will learn about new algorithms, projects and problems.