Machine learning is essentially about making predictions. When analysing an X-ray, is there a broken bone? When understanding maps, will people be crossing the street? And from a financial perspective, can machine learning pick up fraud or what the stock market is likely to do?“

The reason people make predictions is to make effective decisions,” says Dr Benjamin Rosman, a senior lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand in the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. Rosman is also a principal researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and one of the founders and organisers of the Deep Learning Indaba.