Major applications of Machine learning are Search Engine, Spam filter, Route planner, Speech recognition, Facial recognition, Language translation etc. Intelligent computer systems usually include complicated and sophisticated learning algorithms, which also are the key issues of Machine Learning.

When Machine Learning comes to the Internet domain it gains various benefits , for instance, it happens to be much easier and faster to receive tons of training data by recording the web users’ behaviors and data inputs. However it brings up some new challenges also, we need to use the efficient algorithms to filter out the noises, then choose the more usable training data,  shorten the training period and output accurate results.

Numbers of big players in the IT industry has already taken bold moves by applying the Machine Learning techniques into their products. A few successful ones I can name:

Genius playlist in iTunes – a learning algorithm which will pick up all the existing songs from your local music library, send these data to the remote server, work out your taste, match it with other users, then give you a list of songs you may like, and recommend the songs you may want to buy (good business motivation here).

Finding faces in iPhoto – this is basically using the facial recognition techniques. Picasa is having the similar feature but it’s all based online.

Video stabilisation in iMovie – a shaking video shot can be stabilised by applying a learning algorithm, however it may take up quite a long time, and intensive CPU usage.

There are certainly many useful applications can be built by integrated the learning algorithms. I will carry on my research on this subject and work out some of my ideas.

Make fewer HTTP Requests

Again, most response times are spent on making HTTP requests for the components such as images, scripts, stylesheets, Flash, etc. Thus, a simple way to improve response time is to reduce the numbers of components, and you need to find the balance of the performance and the product design.

Use a content delivery network

If your company have all the servers in one location, when the audiences become large, you may need to consider to deploy the content across multiple , geographically dispersed servers.

Add an expires header

A first-time visitor to your website may have to make server HTTP requests, but by using a future Expires header, you can make most components cacheable. If you’re using Apache, the mod_expires module can give you configure the Expires header.

Put Stylesheets at the top

The problem with putting stylesheet near the bottom of the document us that it stops progressive rendering in many browsers.  The browser delays showing any visible components while it is waiting for the stylesheet at the bottom. So always keep the stylesheet links inside the <header>.

Put Scripts at the bottom

It is the opposite compared to the stylesheet, with scripts, progressive rendering is blocked for all contents below the script. Moving scripts lower in the page means more contents is rendered progressively.

Avoid CSS expressions

CSS expressions are powerful and dangerous, due to the frequency with which CSS expressions are evaluated is what makes them work, but also it is what makes them bad for performance.

Make Javascript and CSS external

If the HTML documents contain dynamic contents, which in most the cases are true, the inline Javascript and CSS is downloaded every time when the HTML document is requested. On the other hand, if the Javascript and CSS are in external files cached by the browser, the size of the HTML document is reduced without increasing the number of HTTP requests.

Minify Javascript

Minification is the practice of removing unnecessary characters from code to reduce its size, thus improving load times. You can also use Gzip to compress file, and dramatically decreases the file sizes.

Avoid redirects

There are different reasons for implementing redirects, including website redesign, tracking traffic flow, counting ad impressions, and creating shorter URLs, but the main thing to remember is that redirect make your pages slower.

Last by not least, use the Google Page Speed to evaluate your web pages. It helps to easily find out what elements can be optimised, and how.

See also,

• High Performance Web Sites – Steve Souders
• Page Speed
• Life’s too short, write fast code