>I suspect that if we gave domain experts who often don’t know how to code more power to do feature engineering than we’d see a lot more applied machine learning research like this.
With a lot of talk about high paying AI whiz kids recently I wonder whether it is not much more promising to try to bring basic ML techniques into a really wide field of day-to-day business, given how many small businesses are still completely left out.
I liked this example very much. A small family business of a handful of people used standard ML to automate their process of classifying cucumbers for their business.
Just imagine how many people we could free from manual labour to seek higher education if even only a fraction of family businesses had a use case like this and every one of those farmers or small shop owners who is bogged down by repetitive classification tasks could free up the time of a family member or two. That must be tens of millions if not more people on the whole planet.
With a lot of talk about high paying AI whiz kids recently I wonder whether it is not much more promising to try to bring basic ML techniques into a really wide field of day-to-day business, given how many small businesses are still completely left out.