machine learning

If you are as old as I am (61), you’re probably skeptical about anything labelled artificial intelligence, or AI. Over the course of my engineering career, many claims have been made about AI, and few really panned out. This includes stuff like expert systems and neural networks.

Having said that, though, researchers continued to work in this field, and they have made some gigantic strides. We don’t really call it AI anymore, but products like the Amazon Echo Dot, that can decipher what your saying to it, and services like Netflix, that suggest movies and TV shows that it thinks you might like to watch, are using AI techniques. The amazing thing is that these products and services are actually learning about you and are using that knowledge to serve you better. (Will put aside, at least for now, how they, or their corporate overlords, might use that knowledge to take advantage of you.)

With that in mind, when I saw Machine Learning: The New AI by Ethem Alpaydin, I checked it out. It’s a very well-written book. It explains the concepts without any deep mathematics or code listings. I think that in itself is a remarkable achievement.

Reading this book has, of course, has gotten me to thinking about how we will use machine learning in amateur radio. A couple of years ago, Mauri, AG1LE, started a Kaggle competition to use machine learning to copy Morse Code. He’s also continued working on this, and some of his work can be seen on his Google+ page.

I’m thinking that maybe I can use Amazon’s Alexa technology to control my radio. How cool would it be to say, “Alexa, QSY to 7035 kHz, mode CW?” A little more ambitious project might be to collect data on troubles for a particular radio, or maybe antenna, and then use that database to diagnose problems.

I think the possibilities are endless. What do you think that we could use machine learning for in amateur radio?