Broad Learning Introduction

Abstract

We would like to start this book with an ancient story about “The Blind Men and the Elephant” from John Godfrey Saxe. This story is a famous Indian fable about six blind sojourners who come across different parts of an elephant in their life journeys. In turn, each blind man creates his own version of reality from that limited experiences and perspectives. Instead of explaining its philosophical meanings, we indent to use this story to illustrate the current situations that both the academia and industry are facing about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data mining.