The ability of automatically extracting relevant patterns and information from data is probably the biggest challenge that awaits in the next future. Today, mature technologies and algorithms exists for successful data mining and machine learning, but the somewhat complicated theory behind them has hindered their application for everyday programmers and small companies. In this talk we will introduce in a very gentle way the main concepts and goals of machine learning. We will then conclude by showing a realistic example, and point to dedicated material for the interested audience.