Hello, I'm Carolyn.

I'd like to welcome

you to our course on Machine Learning for
Business Professionals. I lead a team of machine learning engineers who have
successfully implemented many
machine learning projects across various industries. In this course, you will learn
what machine learning
is and how to recognize machine
learning use cases to solve business problems. You will also learn
how to prepare for machine learning and implement
successful projects. There is no math in this course, it is meant for
a non-technical audience. We promise to use
straightforward language and minimize the jargon. But at the same time, to still
provide you with
enough information to be successful at identifying and carrying out machine
learning use cases. In your job, you
will sometimes do ML projects all by yourself. But often, you will
be part of a team. This course is appropriate for a variety of roles in
the modern business. For everyone on your team, whether you are a manager, or a
technical writer, or a programmer,
or a sales person, or a data scientist, we expect that you are
familiar with computers and are interested in using computers to solve
business problems. If you're watching
this video online, you meet our prerequisites. Welcome. As a business
professional, you are part of
an enterprise organization, and your organization
has a mission. At Google, our mission
is to organize the world's information
and make it universally accessible
and useful. At Home Depot, their goal is to provide the highest
level of service, the broadest selection
of products, and the most competitive prices to people in the home
improvement business. At the World Wildlife Fund, their mission is to stop the
degradation of the
planet's natural environment, and to build a future in which humans live in
harmony with nature. Your company has a mission. As a business professional, you
may want to
further that mission. Often, your team's mission
might be smaller, but still advanced that goal. Perhaps your team's mission is to
provide a particular service, and your personal mission is to improve
customer satisfaction. My mission within Google, for example, is to
transform through ML. In this course, you will learn about an exciting new
technology, not for technology sake, but to further the mission
of your organization. You'll learn how to formulate machine-learning solution
to real-world problems, identify whether the data you
have is sufficient for ML, carry a project through various ML phases including
training, evaluation, and deployment, perform
AI responsibly, and avoid reinforcing
existing bias. Discover ML use cases
and be successful at ML. Most of all, this is
a course on ML in practice, as it is employed
in industry today. This is a non-technical course. If you are technical, you'll
learn about
the factors affecting the business success
of your ML efforts. If you are a manager
or a decision-maker, you will learn how
to decide where to apply ML in your organization, so you can get the best return
on your investment. But the key thing
you will learn is to solve business problems using ML. ML is a tool, let's learn
how
to use it in your business. In order to do
our first activity, I need to share two concepts I use to assess ML use cases. The
first concept is difficulty, and the insight is that in order to transform
your business with ML, you should think
about goals that are challenging but not impossible. For example, if you're a
manufacturing business,
the question, how could we produce
perfect products each time is nearly impossible. There will always
be some defects. On the other hand, how
could we predict whether our assembly line is
moving is too simple. How could we reduce
the number of accidents on our factory floor is just right. The second concept
you need to use to assess ML use cases
is specificity. Just like with difficulty, there's a sweet spot between too open
and too specific that allows teams to establish a heading but not get
derailed by obstacles. How could we have no
safety violations in our company is very open. Companies might have
many different types of safety violations that are qualitatively different
from each other. How could we reduce
accidents caused by operator negligence is on
the other end of the spectrum, it is too narrow and specific. Surely, there are
other kinds
of accidents too, but how can we
reduce the number of accidents on our factory
floor is just right. For this activity,
you practice rating a number of ML use cases and discussing those ratings with your
fellow
students on the forums. For each use case, determine its rating with respect to
difficulty and specificity. I like to think of use cases as living in
a two-dimensional space, like the one you see here.