DARPA is looking to make huge strides in machine learning

The U.S. Defense Department's research and development arm is offering to fund projects that will simplify the massively complex task of building models for machine learning applications.

Models are a fundamental part of machine learning. Similar to algorithms, they help teach computers to, say, identify a cat in a photo, forecast weather from historical data or sort spam from legitimate email.

But writing the models takes time and requires many skills. Typically, data scientists, subject matter experts and software engineers all have to come together to develop the model.

When New York University researchers wanted to model block-by-block traffic flow data for the city, it took 60 person-months of work by data scientists to prepare the data for use and an additional 30 person-months to develop the model.

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