Introduction

• Learn - improve automatically with experience
• Database Mining - learning from medical records which treatments are most effective
• Self Customizing programs - houses learning to optimize energy costs based on particular usage patterns of their occupants - personal software assistants learning the evolving interests of their users in order to highlight relevant stories from online newspapers
• Applications we can't program by hand - autonomous driving - speech recognition
• might lead to a better understanding of human learning abilities (and disabilities)