Definitions:
1)Arthur Samuel: "the field of study that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed"
2)Tom Mitchell:"A computer program is said to learn from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P, if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E"
Supervised learning: Regression & Classification
Unsupervised learning: Clustering & Non-clustering("Cocktail Party Algorithm")
i.e. organize computing cluster, social network analysis, market segmentation, astronomical data analysis
Reference: coursera, Machine Learning, Andrew Ng