Machine learning is a part of artificial intelligence that 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 that can be used to carry out data analysis with supervised (prediction, classification) or unsupervised (grouping, dimension reduction) purposes. For this reason, machine learning is closely related to statistics and is studied by students of the UNY Undergraduate Statistics Study Program in the Machine Learning Statistics course.

In order to introduce students to the very rapid development of Machine Learning, the Statistics Study Program invited a professor who has long applied machine learning in statistical procedures as a resource person. He is Prof. Osval-Antonio Montesinos-Lopez, Ph.D., who teaches at Universidad de Colima, Mexico. Apart from teaching, Prof. Osval also carries out various research in the field of 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 it was carried out online, the presence of Prof. Osval's Machine Learning Statistics lecture  gave inspiration and amazing new nuances. For six weeks, Prof. Osval guides students to review the meaning of machine learning, study Ridge regression and LASSO 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 had the opportunity to try program codes on their respective computers or laptops.

Apart from being attended by students, this Visiting Professor activity was also attended by lecturers from the UNY Mathematics Education Department. "The material is complete and clear," were the comments given by the lecturers regarding Prof. Osval. Hopefully Prof. Osval can motivate the entire academic community of the UNY Statistics Study Program to study in depth and carry out research in the field of Machine Learning.