Though these technologies are complex, it’s crucial that we understand them and how they work since they are powering the next wave of applications, performing tasks so complicated that traditional programming techniques can’t solve them.

Buzz phrases such as “artificial intelligence,” “machine learning” and “natural language processing” are becoming increasingly commonplace within the tech industry. There is a lot of ambiguity around these phrases, so I’ll explain the substance behind the technologies and why I believe they’re transforming the way we live, work and play.

When I graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2007, I left with a compelling sense that the technology I’d been working with for the last five years had the potential to change the world. I’d recently completed a Ph.D. on the application of a new set of tools and techniques from the emerging field of Machine Learning (ML) to a range of tasks involving human languages — a field known as Natural Language Processing (NLP). If this sounds confusing, I’m not surprised! Many of the concepts are inherently complex. However, to try and make things clearer, ML is about building software capable of learning how to perform tasks that are too complex to be solved via traditional programming techniques. For example, during…

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