Didn't even notice the date
... Sorry for necro.
I am normally a machine learning skeptic. Right now everybody is jumping on it big time since quantum computing could make it much more efficient at the snip of a finger very soon. Even a non-universal quantum computer like the D-wave.
I don't think anybody means to say that they think ML has more future generally than other software styles. The looming breakthroughs make everybody go wild so that they are ready when something happens soon. They can always go the other stuff later.
I am a bit torn. I still see the same problems in ML that it always had. On the other hand it would be an easy ride on the currently ongoing wave.
Let me ask this way: any conferences in Hawaii, Malta or Nijmegen this year?
The quantum for me is still like fusion nuclear power. I will believe it works when it works. Imho, not till 2030+
They've also had the whole DNA-computers going for 15+ years and its also about 20+ years away still. Quantum could be closer though.
I don't wanna push M-L more than it can handle either, but I do think it finally has come to be accepted and more importantly, can be used and sold as projects in real business scenarios;
Background: A lot of what I do is data staging, ingestion, governance, architecture, data lake work (new for 2016 though), statistics and prep for visualization tools (Tableau mostly). But I also do quite a bit of R, some BigR (cause it cough does not work all that well cough) and some Spark and Python. I will be doing Python on Cluster on Cloudera very soon though as we just made a partner-isch deal with Cloudera.
Business wise, as a consultant, I can say that we have some trouble with smaller companies and public entities, but it improves every quarter with beliefs and case stories where M-L comes in and makes it through a full iterative business cycle and pushes decisions from reactive, to preventive to driven by it. I have a few things where it cannot be used unsupervised (as in, not automated) such as where human lives are at stake, but apart from that there are quite a few business cases where its pure gold, sales wise atm. Fraud and other anomality places.
I agree that M-L might not be all THAT important for a benchmark, especially not on GPUs yet, as it isn't really that usual "big hog" on performance; That is only when all the other 95% of the work has been set up and works as intended and all governance is in place etc etc.
And then by far the most I've seen, run their stuff on CPU and in-memory servers. GPU is mostly for HPC (Supercomputers) and/or research projects that can go on Amazon clouds because of public datasets etc. Have not seen on-premise GPU clusters for private/public sector computing yet.
The conferences reference went over my head. Is it a specific annual conference or some "hot and cozy" place for a conference?