A Brief Overview of Machine Learning

This chapter provides an overview of the field of machine learning, focusing on the historical developments that have led to its current state. Beginning with the conceptual breakthroughs from over 60 years ago, the chapter discusses key achievements from each subsequent decade. While the overview is not comprehensive, it offers some of the key insights that paved the way for contemporary deep learning and multimodal learning. Despite significant advancements in the field, some of the hard problems identified decades ago remain unresolved even today. The chapter concludes with a summary of progress in the field of deep learning, which has seen remarkable advancements in the last decade. Some of the approaches described in this chapter serve as the foundation for creating multimodal systems, which have become a lively research field. This chapter aims to familiarize the reader with some of the key concepts that eventually led to the improvements in multimodal systems reported in recent years, which is the main focus of this book.