With so much hype around AI and ML and how it is gonna revolutionalize everything around you, there is a very crucial link people tend to miss out for it to happen. And that is Internet-of-Things or simply IoT.
Let’s understand the fundamentals of ML and how it transforms any process. Take the example of an online streaming service like Netflix. Based on your watching history, it will recommend the shows & movies you should watch next.
Before such a recommendation engine, we were used to deciding based on the ratings. Ratings though do a good job in differentiating absurd cinema from good ones, it doesn’t really help much on whether you would enjoy a movie or not. You might love a 6-star rated movie but wouldn’t enjoy an 8-star rated.
Since Netflix has millions of users watching content over its platform, they have humongous data where users explicitly (thumbs up and down) and implicitly (watching the complete series, clicking on a particular poster of the same movie or another) tell whether they like some movie or not, Netflix based on that data it personalizes the recommendations for you (Not for some critics).
Netflix also predicts based on your watching history and millions of others, what each user would be watching, and then caches (loads in advance) to the nearest data center to those users. Netflix also needs to process lots of Media processing (Video conversions in different formats & resolutions for different devices), which is a costly process. So it optimizes that cost by predicting the future server loads again based on the historical data of the server loads available and allocates these tasks to the underutilized resources.
So you would see Machine Learning has introduced personalization to each user (which wasn’t possible before) and also optimized all the processes for a much superior efficiency and better utilization of resources available.
So what enabled Netflix to personalize the experience and optimizes all its resources?
The data they had accumulated of customer’s behavior and their resource usages accumulated over a period of time.
Only with the sufficiently large and relevant data, they were able to achieve all this.
But Netflix and all other platforms have a very unique advantage. Since there complete ecosystem is digital, all their data is collected continuously and any personalization/recommendations can be served. All its resources are digital and are monitored and controlled in real-time. But that is not the case with most of the processes around you.
Your life is not limited to the digital devices that you use. In fact, most of your activities are outside that screen.
#internet-of-things #digital-transformation #ai #iot #machine-learning