Question: How can algorithms affect our everyday lives and the way we live?

Sreejita Ghosh answered on 7 Jan 2020: last edited 7 Jan 2020 2:48 pm

1. When you use Google Maps to find your way to some place you are using an algorithm which did a number of calculations to optimize the shortest route to point A from point B.
2. When you use Spotify to listen to music the algorithms in the app ‘learn’ from your choice of music your top artists/bands, songs, and even recommends to you music which you haven’t yet heard on the app but which the app think you might appreciate. This is based on ‘Association rule mining’ of machine learning.
3. You also find ‘Association rule mining’ implementation when you are doing online shopping and you are suggested by the website bot some other things which it associates with the stuff which you are buying. Thus algorithms can influence what you buy, and what you listen to.
4.Banks also use Algorithms which are designed to find ‘risky’ and ‘safe’ clients for loan. But in this area I personally believe that algorithms should be more interpretable so that both bank employees and the loan seekers know why a loan was sanctioned and why rejected. Some health insurance companies use similar algorithms to figure out whether they will or will not accept some clients based on the client’s medical history.
5. Algorithms are being used in trading in stock markets to find the optimum time for buying and selling of the ‘perfect’ shares at a certain time. These are mostly regression based algorithms.
6. In the last iteration of ‘I am a Scientist, get me out of here’ I met a fellow Computer Scientist who was using machine learning for predicting the ‘health’ of bridges in the UK (in other words, he was trying to predict when a bridge might fall, and then take measures to prevent that from happening). So algorithms are used also for maintenance / monitoring of structures built. Using the metereological data, machine learning algorithms can predict weather (this was another fellow scientist from the last iteration of IAS). The winner of the IAS from the Big Data zone (again, from the Nov 2019 iteration) is using machine learning algorithms in forensic research to help the police catch a criminal faster.
7. Lastly, and the bit personal to me, algorithms are being used in medical research for early diagnosis, personalised medicine, treatment monitoring, prediction of readmission in a hospital for a certain chronic disease, and so much more. My research is in early diagnosis of inborn steroidogenic disorders using interpretable machine learning algorithm called Learning vector quantization (LVQ).