1. 256 Shades of Gray

If you were to create a list of current hot topics in technology, machine learning would certainly be somewhere among the top spots. And yet, while the term shows up everywhere, what it means exactly is often shrouded in confusion. Is it the same thing as “big data,” or perhaps “data science”? How is it different from statistics? On the surface, machine learning might appear to be an exotic and intimidating specialty that uses fancy mathematics and algorithms, with little in common with the daily activities of a software engineer.