Web 2.0 brought a swath of new applications, from mining social networks to figuring out what bloggers are saying about your products. In parallel, scientists of all stripes were increasingly turning to large-scale modeling, with molecular biologists and astronomers leading the charge. The housing bust barely registered; its main effect was a welcome transfer of talent from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. In 2011, the “big data” meme hit, putting machine learning squarely in the center of the global economy’s future. Today, there seems to be hardly an area of human endeavor untouched by machine
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