The goal of this course is to introduce students to the field of machine learning, its algorithms and applications.  Machine learning algorithms allow computers to automatically learn to recognize complex patterns from empirical data, such as text and web documents, images, videos, sound, sensor-data, and databases.  This course is intended to give a broad overview of machine learning from the practical standpoint, with a focus on implementing and applying machine learning algorithms to real-world problems.  At the end of the course, students will have both working knowledge of and practical experience implementing and applying machine learning algorithms on different domains.