Think Artificial Intelligence and the first thing that comes to mind is probably robots. Thanks to popular culture, AI is considered distinctly un-human, and can prompt people to worry about the role of technology in our daily lives and who is really in control. However, there’s a new wave of technology fighting to put the human back at the heart of the experience, one that is designed to make the technology that you use every single day learn from you personally.

Called Machine Learning, it underlies technology that constantly evolves to adapt to every individual, anticipating what you want to do next and staying one step ahead. Machine Learning is about building software capable of learning how to perform tasks that are too complex to be solved by traditional programming techniques. During my PhD research at the University of Cambridge, for example, I built programs that could recognise topics in news articles and filter spam email.