I'm glad you're here. It's about time we talked about machine learning. Machine learning is no longer just a buzzword, it is all around us: from protecting your email, to automatically tagging friends in pictures, to predicting what movies you like. As a subfield of data science, machine learning enables computers to learn through experience: to make predictions about the future using collected data from the past. And the amount of data to be analyzed is enormous! Current estimates put the daily amount of produced data at 2.5 exabytes (or roughly 1 billion gigabytes). Can you believe it? This would be enough data to fill up 10 million blu-ray discs, or amount to 90 years of HD video. In order to deal with this vast amount of data, companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook have been heavily investing in the development of data science platforms that allow us to benefit from machine learning wherever we go—scaling from your mobile phone application all the way to supercomputers connected through the cloud.