{"id":258,"date":"2020-09-03T10:13:43","date_gmt":"2020-09-03T14:13:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macloo.com\/ai\/?p=258"},"modified":"2020-09-03T10:13:43","modified_gmt":"2020-09-03T14:13:43","slug":"googles-machine-learning-course-for-journalists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macloo.com\/ai\/2020\/09\/03\/googles-machine-learning-course-for-journalists\/","title":{"rendered":"Google\u2019s machine learning \u2018course\u2019 for journalists"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I couldn’t resist dipping into this free course<\/a> from the Google News Initiative, and what I found surprised me: eight short lessons that are available as PDFs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The good news: The lessons are<\/em> journalism-focused, and they provide a painless introduction to the subject. The bad news: This is not really a course or a class at all \u2014 although there is one quiz at the end. And you can get a certificate, for what it’s worth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s a lot here that many journalists might not be aware of, and that’s a plus. You get a brief, clear description of Reuters’ News Tracer<\/strong> and Lynx Insight<\/strong> tools, both used in-house to help journalists discover new stories using social media or other data (Lesson 1). A report I recall hearing about \u2014 how automated real-estate stories<\/a> brought significant new subscription revenue to a Swedish news publisher \u2014 is included in a quick summary of “robot reporting” (also Lesson 1).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lesson 2 helpfully explains what machine learning is <\/em>without getting into technical operations of the systems that do the “learning.” They don’t get into what training a model entails, but they make clear that once the model exists, it is used to make predictions<\/em>. The predictions are not like what some tarot-card reader tells you but rather probability-based results that the model is able to produce, based on its prior training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Noting that machine learning is a subset<\/em> of the wider field called artificial intelligence is, of course, accurate. What is inaccurate is the definition “specific applications that use data to train a model<\/strong> to perform a given task independently and learn from experience.” They left out Q-learning<\/a>, a type of reinforcement learning (a subset <\/em>of machine learning), which does not<\/em> use a model. It’s okay that they left it out, but they shouldn’t imply that all<\/em> machine learning requires a trained model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The explosion of machine learning and AI in the past 10 years is explained nicely and concisely in Lesson 2. The lesson also touches on misconceptions and confusion surrounding AI:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The lack of an officially agreed definition, the legacy of science-fiction, and a general low level of literacy on AI-related topics are all contributing factors.”<\/p>\u2014Lesson 2, Is Machine Learning the same thing as AI?<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I’ll be looking at Lessons 3 and 4 tomorrow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Creative<\/a>
\nAI in Media and Society<\/strong><\/span> by Mindy McAdams<\/span> is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License<\/a>.
\nInclude the author’s name (Mindy McAdams) and a link to the original post in any reuse of this content.<\/small><\/p>\n\n\n\n

.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I couldn’t resist dipping into this free course from the Google News Initiative, and what I found surprised me: eight short lessons that are available as PDFs. The good news: The lessons are journalism-focused, and they provide a painless introduction to the subject. The bad news: This is not really a course or a class… Continue reading Google\u2019s machine learning \u2018course\u2019 for journalists<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[53,54,11],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-machine-learning","tag-course","tag-journalism","tag-learning"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macloo.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macloo.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macloo.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macloo.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macloo.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.macloo.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":263,"href":"https:\/\/www.macloo.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions\/263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macloo.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macloo.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macloo.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}