On Friday the 10th Tommy Jones, who works for Q-Tel came to talk to us. I found is views on Data Scientists as a whole to be funny and accurate. He split them into three groups. Those who think that NLP will allows machines to think, those who think neural networks are just like a human brain and those who view machine learning as just advanced statistics. He definitely sees machine learning as advanced statistics. I'm beginning to learn the field would not work if it wasn't. I thought his discussion of parsing versus understanding was interesting. What it came down to was that we have the technology for machines to recognize parts of speech and extract information, but they can't extrapolate from that information. He pointed out that no machine learning technique can figure out when Harry and Hermione first meet in Harry Potter, because it isn't explicitly stated. They have information but no knowledge. It's up for the data scientists to not only extract that information from models and graphs, but to turn it into knowledge.