Machine Learning in Secondary Education?

Given the alarming drop in applications to Computer Science (CS) studies across Europe, any efforts at presenting CS as an interesting, challenging, and useful discipline are welcome and necessary. In this note I present my view that it is possible to introduce motivated secondary-school students to the basic goals, techniques, and applications of Machine Learning. Furthermore, I claim that Machine Learning is almost unique among the subfields of CS with this property, and therefore the Machine Learning community has a special duty to help attracting students to CS. I then present some very preliminary thoughts on a project aiming at developing and deploying appropriate teaching materials, and argue that the PASCAL2 NOE is the ideal agent to set up and coordinate such an initiative in Europe. An even more preliminary version of this note was presented at the 2008 Teaching Machine Learning Workshop in Saint-Étienne, France.