Inference Algorithm and Probabilistic Programming at MIT

Historically, building a machine-learning system capable of learning a new task would take a graduate student somewhere between a few weeks and several months, says Daniel Roy, a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science who along with Cameron Freer, an instructor in pure mathematics, led the new research. A handful of new, experimental, probabilistic programming languages — one of which, Church, was developed at MIT — promise to cut that time down to a matter of hours.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/machine-learning-0518.html