Machine learning is part of artificial intelligence which is developing very rapidly. Even though the term contains the word machine or "machine," machine learning has nothing to do with machines! Machine learning is a term to refer to a set of procedures for analyzing data with supervised (predictive, classification) or unsupervised (grouping, dimension reduction) goals. For this reason, machine learning is closely related to statistics and is studied by students of the UNY's Statistics Undergraduate Study Program in the Machine Learning Statistics course.

To introduce students to the rapid development of Machine Learning, the Statistics Study Program invited a professor who has been using Machine Learning in statistical procedures for a long time. He is Prof. Osval-Antonio Montesinos-Lopez, Ph.D., who teaches at Universidad de Colima, Mexico. Besides teaching, Prof. Osval has also carried out various research in agriculture using machine learning methods. From years of research, dozens of articles in scientific journals have been produced by Prof. Osval and his colleagues. He is also one of the authors of a book entitled Multivariate Statistical Machine Learning Methods for Genomic Prediction, published by Springer Nature.

Even though the lectures were conducted online, Prof. Osval gave amazing new inspiration and nuances. For six weeks, Prof. Osval guided students to review the notion of machine learning, study Ridge and LASSO regression for regression and classification purposes, and study random forests. In every meeting, Prof. Osval explained the theoretical basis of each method and demonstrated its application to R software. After the lecture, students could try program codes on their respective computers or laptops.

Apart from being attended by students, the Visiting Professor activity was also attended by lecturers from the Mathematics Education Department of UNY. "The material is complete and clear," said the comments given by the lecturers on Prof.'s lectures. Osval. We hope this course can motivate the entire academic community of the UNY Statistics Study Program to study in-depth and conduct research in Machine Learning.