I'm passionate about machine learning because I believe that it is at this beautiful and rare intersection of logic and creativity, of structure and exploration, of concreteness and abstraction. From it comes patterns and principled engineering, no doubt, but the nature of building intelligent systems that can learn and adapt to solve complex problems yields so much fodder for the eager imagination that you can find yourself absolutely immersed in what you can do with it. Its potential is seemingly without limit, constrained only by your own creativity. Even when you're pulling on this tome of knowledge compiled by countless researchers before you, you're using it to create new models that have never existed. You're getting to learn novel techniques and uncover insights no one has found before. You're getting to create intelligence from data and algorithms.