I run a company that specializes in design & implementation of kick-ass ML solutions [1]. We've had successful projects in quite a few industries at this point:<p>LEGAL INDUSTRY<p>Aka e-discovery [2]: produce digital documents in legal proceedings.<p><i>What was special</i>: stringent requirements on statistical robustness! (the opposing party can challenge your process in court -- everything about way you build your datasets or measure the production recall the has to be absolutely bullet proof)<p>IT & SECURITY<p>Anomaly detection in system usage patterns (with features like process load, frequency, volume) using NNs.<p>What was special: extra features from document content (type of document being accessed, topic modeling, classification).<p>MEDIA<p>Built tiered IAB classification [3] for magazine and newspaper articles.<p>Built a topic modeling system to automatically discover themes in large document collections (articles, tweets), to replace manual taxonomies and tagging, for consistent KPI tracking.<p><i>What was special</i>: massive data volumes, real-time processing.<p>REAL ESTATE<p>Built a recommendation engine that automatically assembles newsletters, and learns user preferences from their feedback (newsletter clicks), using multi-arm bandits.<p><i>What was special</i>: exploration / exploitation tradeoff from implicit and explicit feedback. Topic modeling to get relevant features.<p>LIBRARY DISCOVERY<p>Built a search engine (which is called "discovery" in this industry), based on Elasticsearch.<p><i>What was special</i>: we added a special plugin for "related article" recommendations, based on semantic analysis on article content (LDA, LSI).<p>HUMAN RESOURCES (HR)<p>Advised on an engine to automatically match CVs to job descriptions.<p>Built an ML engine to automatically route incoming job positions to hierarchy of some 1,000 pre-defined job categories.<p>Built a system to automatically extract structured information from (barely structured) CV PDFs.<p>Built a ML system to build "user profiles" from enterprise data (logs, wikis), then automatically match incoming help requests in plain text to domain experts.<p><i>What was special</i>: Used bayesian inference to handle knowledge uncertainty and combine information from multiple sources.<p>TRANSPORTATION<p>Built a system to extract structured fixtures and cargoes from unstructured provider data (emails, attachments).<p><i>What was special</i>: deep learning architecture on character level, to handle the massive amount of noise and variance.<p>BANKING<p>Built a system to automatically navigate banking sites for US banks, and scrape them on behalf of the user, using their provided username/password/MFA.<p><i>What was special</i>: PITA of headless browsing. The ML part of identifying forms, pages and transactions was comparatively straightforward.<p>--------------<p>... and a bunch of others :)<p>Overall, in all cases, lots of tinkering and careful analysis to build something that actually works, as each industry is different and needs lots of SME. The dream of a "turn-key general-purpose ML" is still ways off, recent AI hype notwithstanding.<p>[1] <a href="http://rare-technologies.com/" rel="nofollow">http://rare-technologies.com/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_discovery" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_discovery</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.iab.com/guidelines/iab-quality-assurance-guidelines-qag-taxonomy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.iab.com/guidelines/iab-quality-assurance-guideli...</a>