Efforts to replicate the human ability to classify objects have historically been largely academic, lab-bound and isolated; each employs one chosen algorithm, is often coded, tuned and operated on the same platform; and does not apply continuous learning or evolution. In the world of the Industrial Internet, there is an opportunity to have many different machines observing the physical world through a variety of sensors and applying a “collective learning”, such that the experience of the individual machine contributes to the learning of the whole.