Rumman Chowdhury, Accenture

My passion lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and humanity. I come to data science from a quantitative social science background. Currently, I am a Senior Manager at Accenture, working on cutting edge applications of Artificial Intelligence. Currently, I serve on the Board of Directors for three AI startups. I hold two undergraduate degrees from MIT, and a Masters in Quantitative Methods of the Social Sciences from Columbia University. I am near completion of my PhD from the University of California, San Diego. More recently, I have emerged as a thought leader in the San Francisco Data Science community, with talks and tutorials at Intel Analytics Conference, Open Data Science Conference, Machine Learning Conference, Women Catalysts, PyBay, and Demystifying AI Conference. In mainstream media, I have been interviewed for the PHDivas podcast, German Public Television, and fashion line MM LaFleur. In 2017, have upcoming talks at the Global Artificial Intelligence Conference, at Strata + Hadoop San Jose, Southern Data Science Conference, and Strata + Hadoop London.

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI

OpenAI Universe

AI systems are trained to perform one task. While such systems are immensely useful, future AI systems will be general, with common sense and general problem solving ability. To train such systems, we created OpenAI Universe, a software platform that allows an agent to interact with any program or website via pixels, keyboard, and mouse, thus providing access to the vast digital universe of existing programs and websites, and therefore, a great variety of tasks. In this talk, I will present Universe, and preliminary results in a research direction that, if pushed to its logical extreme, will result in systems with a general problem solving ability.

Ilya Sutskever received his PhD in 2012 from the University of Toronto working with Geoffrey Hinton. After completing his PhD, he cofounded DNNResearch with Geoffrey Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky which was acquired by Google. He is interested in all aspects of neural networks and their applications.

Andrew Tulloch, Facebook

Deep Learning in Production at Facebook

Facebook is powered by machine learning and AI. From advertising relevance, news feed and search ranking to computer vision, face recognition, and speech recognition, we run ML models at massive scale, computing trillions of predictions every day. I'll talk about some of the tools and tricks we use for scaling both the training and deployment of some of our deep learning models at Facebook. I'll also cover some useful libraries that we've open-sourced for production-oriented deep learning applications.

I'm a research engineer at Facebook, working on the Facebook AI Research and Applied Machine Learning teams to drive the large amount of AI applications at Facebook. At Facebook, I've worked on the large scale event prediction models powering ads and News Feed ranking, the computer vision models powering image understanding, and many other machine learning projects. I'm a contributor to several deep learning frameworks, including Torch and Caffe. Before Facebook, I obtained a masters in mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a bachelors in mathematics from the University of Sydney.

Brendan Frey, Deep Genomics

Reprogramming the Human Genome: Why AI is Needed

We have figured out how to write to the genome using DNA editing, but we don't know what the outcomes of genetic modifications will be. This is called the "genotype-phenotype gap". To close the gap, we need to reverse-engineer the genetic code, which is very hard because biology is too complicated and noisy for human interpretation. Machine learning and super-human AI are needed. The data? Six billion letters per genome, hundreds of thousands of biomolecules, hundreds of cell types, over six billion people on the planet. A new generation of "Bio-AI" researchers are poised to crack the problem, but we face extraordinary challenges. I'll discuss these challenges, focusing on which branches of AI will have the most impact and why.

Brendan Frey is internationally recognized as a leader in machine learning and genome biology. His group has published over a dozen papers in Science, Nature and Cell, and their most recent work on using deep learning to identify protein-DNA interactions was highlighted on the front cover Nature Biotechnology. Frey is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has consulted for several industrial research and development laboratories in Canada, the United States and England, and has served on the Technical Advisory Board of Microsoft Research. Most recently, Dr. Frey spun out a company called Deep Genomics.

Andrej Karpathy, Tesla

I'll present our work on training reinforcement learning agents to interact with and complete tasks in web browsers. In the short term our agents are learning to interact with common UI web elements like buttons, sliders and text fields. In the longer term we hope to address more complex tasks, such as achieving competence in interactive online exercises intended for schoolchildren to learn mathematics. I'll use these examples to also give a short but complete Reinforcement Learning tutorial.

Andrej is a 5th year PhD student at Stanford University, studying Deep Learning and its applications to Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. He is also Head of Artificial Intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla. In particular, his recent work has focused on Image Captioning, Recurrent Neural Network Language Models and Reinforcement Learning. On a side, he enjoys implementing state of the art Deep Learning models in Javascript, competing against Convolutional Networks on the ImageNet challenge, and blogging. Before joining Stanford he completed an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Physics at the University of Toronto and a Computer Science Master's degree at the University of British Columbia.

Ofir Nachum, Google

UREX: Under-appreciated Reward Exploration

The most widely-used exploration methods in reinforcement learning today (like entropy regularization and epsilon-greedy) have not changed much in the last 20 years. We argue that these exploration strategies are naive and misguided in large action spaces. We present UREX, a policy gradient algorithm that explores more in areas of high reward. We motivate UREX mathematically by showing that its objective is a combination of expected reward and a mean-seeking KL divergence with the "expert" policy. Moreover, we show that UREX empirically performs better than standard methods on a suite of algorithmic tasks.

Ofir Nachum currently works at Google Brain as a Research Resident. His research focuses on sequence-to-sequence models and reinforcement learning, although his interests include a much larger area of machine learning. He received his Bachelor's and Master's from MIT. Before joining Google, he was an engineer at Quora, leading machine learning efforts on the feed, ranking, and quality teams.

Chelsea Finn, UC Berkeley

End-To-End Deep Robotic Learning

Deep learning has enabled countless successes on a number of applications, including computer vision, speech recognition, and machine translation. While many of such systems are already deployed, the field of robotics has yet to reap the benefits that other areas have experienced -- in general, standard deep learning methods are not directly applicable to robotic learning. In this talk, I will discuss how deep unsupervised and supervised learning techniques can enable robots to learn manipulation skills from raw pixel inputs. In particular, I will show how robots can learn mental models of the visual world and imagine the outcomes of their actions, and how unsupervised learning can be used to allow robots to build internal representations of moving objects. I will end by sharing my vision for the future of deep robotic learning and hypothesize what machine learning advances we need before reaching human-level AI in robotics.

Chelsea Finn is a PhD student at UC Berkeley, studying machine learning for robotic perception and control. She is interested in how learning algorithms can enable robots to autonomously acquire complex sensorimotor skills. Before joining Berkeley AI Research, she received a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

Toru Nishikawa, Preferred Networks

Preferred Networks Inc. (PFN), has been actively working on applications of deep learning on real world problems. In collaboration with leading companies and research institues, PFN has been focusing on deep learning in three domains: Industrial machinery including manufacturing robots, Smart transportation including autonomous driving, and Lifescience including cancer diagnosis and treatment. In December 2016, together with FANUC, a world leader in industrial machinery and industrial robots, we launch the world’s first commercial IoT platform for manufacturing that has Deep Learning technology at its core. In IoT, among other industries, Deep Learning is not only a research topic any more, but an important key technology in driving business.

The dramatic evolvement in the functional capabilities of IoT devices, and the fact that data generated by devices is incomparably larger than that generated by humans, are two particularly important factors contributing to the fast-paced innovation in various industries. Similarly, advancement in Deep Learning research is expanding its applications beyond pure data analysis to device actuation and control in the physical world. However, in order for algorithms to be able to efficiently learn real-time control of real world devices, a combination of advancement in both Deep Learning and computing is essential. That is the concept of Edge-Heavy-Computing where by bringing intelligence close to the network edge devices, the overall system makes it possible for those devices to efficiently learn in a distributed and collaborative manner, while resolving the data communication bottleneck often faced in IoT applications. In this talk, I will introduce some of the work we have been doing at PFN, highlight some results, and also give examples of how new computing boosts the value brought by Deep Learning.

Toru Nishikawa is the president and CEO of Preferred Networks, Inc., a Tokyo-based startup company specialized in applying the latest artificial intelligence technologies to emerging problems in the area of Internet of Things (IoT). He was one of the world finalists of the ACM ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest) while he was a graduate student of University of Tokyo. In 2006, he, together with his collegemates and his fellow contenders at ICPC, founded Preferred Infrastructure, Inc., a precursor company. In 2014, Nishikawa founded Preferred Networks with the aim of expanding their businesses into the realization of Deep Intelligence – a future IoT in which all devices, as well as the network itself, are equipped with machine intelligence. He is an ambitious entrepreneur, programmer, and father of a child.

Ian Goodfellow, Google Brain

Ian Goodfellow is a Staff Research Scientist at Google Brain. He is the lead author of the MIT Press textbook Deep Learning. In addition to generative models, he also studies security and privacy for machine learning. He has contributed to open source libraries including TensorFlow, Theano, and Pylearn2. He obtained a PhD from University of Montreal in Yoshua Bengio's lab, and an MSc from Stanford University, where he studied deep learning and computer vision with Andrew Ng. He is generally interested in all things deep learning.

Alexei Efros, UC Berkeley

Unsupervised Learning in Computer Vision

Computer vision has made great progress through the use of deep learning, trained with large-scale labeled data. However, good labeled data requires expertise and curation and can be expensive to collect. Can one discover useful visual representations without the use of explicitly curated labels? In this talk, I will present several case studies exploring the paradigm of self-supervised learning -- using raw data as its own supervision -- for tasks in computer vision and computer graphics.

Alexei Efros (associate professor, UC Berkeley) works in the area of computer vision and computer graphics, especially at the intersection of the two. He is particularly interested in using data-driven techniques to tackle problems where large quantities of unlabeled visual data are readily available. He is a recipient of NSF CAREER award (2006), Sloan Fellowship (2008), Guggenheim Fellowship (2008), SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award (2010), and the Helmholtz Test-of-Time Prize (2013).

Durk Kingma, OpenAI

Variational Autoencoders

Current deep learning mostly relies on supervised learning: given a vast amount of examples of humans performing tasks such as labeling images or translation, we can teach computers to mimic humans at these tasks. Since supervised methods only focus on modeling the task directly, however, these methods are not particularly efficient: they need much more examples than humans require for learning new tasks. Enter unsupervised learning, where computers not only model tasks, but also their context, vastly improving data efficiency. We discuss the powerful framework of Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), a synthesis of deep learning and Bayesian methods, as a principled yet practical approach towards unsupervised deep learning. In addition to the underlying mathematics, we discuss current scientific and practical applications of VAEs, such as semi-supervised learning, drug discovery, and image resynthesis.

Diederik (or Durk) Kingma is a Research Scientist at OpenAI, with a focus on unsupervised deep learning. His research carreer started in 2009, while graduated at Utrecht University, working with prof. Yann LeCun at NYU. Since 2013, he pursues a PhD with prof. Max Welling in Amsterdam, focusing on the intersection of deep learning and Bayesian inference. Early in his PhD, he proposed the Variational Autoencoder (VAE), a principled framework for Bayesian unsupervised deep learning. Other well-known work is Adam, a now standard method for stochastic gradient descent.

Brad Folkens, CloudSight

Your AI is Blind

The final missing piece in AI is Visual Cognition and Understanding. In order for this dream to be realized, it takes more than winning scores at classifying ImageNet. We discuss our 4 years of experience in scaling, quality control, data management, and other important lessons learned in commercializing computer vision in the marketplace, including the procurement of the largest training dataset ever created for Visual Cognition and Understanding through Deep Learning.

Brad Folkens is the co-founder and CTO of CloudSight, where he leads the effort to build the world’s first visual cognition platform to power the future of AI. He earned his Theoretical Computer Science and Mathematics degrees with honors and immediately went to work building profitable companies, first with the award winning PublicSalary.com HR Tool, and later with his co-founder, Dominik, grossing over $1m/year in revenue.

Shivon Zilis, Bloomberg

Shivon is a partner and founding member of Bloomberg Beta, a $75 million venture fund backed by Bloomberg L.P. that invests in startups transforming the future of work. Shivon is obsessed with the most important force changing work, machine intelligence. She is known for an annual report that researches thousands of machine intelligence companies and selects the most promising real-world problems they are solving. Bloomberg Beta has invested in more than 25 machine intelligence companies to date. She graduated from Yale, where she was the goalie on the ice hockey team. She is an advisor to OpenAI, a fellow at the Creative Destruction Lab, on the advisory board of University of Alberta's Machine Learning group, and a charter member of C100. She co-hosts an annual conference at the University of Toronto that brings together the foremost authors, academics, founders, and investors in machine intelligence. She was one of Forbes 30 Under 30 in Venture Capital.

Modar Alaoui, Eyeris

Driver Monitoring For Connected Semi-autonomous Vehicles & The Future Of Automotive HMI

This session will cover an artificially intelligent driver attention, cognitive awareness and emotion distraction monitoring system. We reveal how the technology reads facial micro expressions in real time to authenticate drivers and distinctly detect their seven universal emotions, gender, age group, eye tracking, 3D head pose and gaze estimation. During the second half of this session, we will cover a number of driver derivative metrics that trigger the activation of various reactive support systems, necessary to saving lives and improving driving behavior through better Human Machine Interfaces. This session will end with a highly rated 1-minute live demo on stage!

Modar is a serial entrepreneur and expert in AI-based vision software development. He is currently founder and CEO at Eyeris, developer of a Deep Learning-based emotion recognition software, EmoVu, that reads facial micro-expressions. Eyeris uses Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN's) as a Deep Learning architecture to train and deploy its algorithm in to a number of today’s commercial applications. Modar combines a decade of experience between Human Machine Interaction (HMI) and Audience Behavioral Measurement. He is a frequent keynoter on “Ambient Intelligence”, a winner of several technology and innovation awards and has been featured in many major publications for his work.

Inmar Givoni, Kindred

Inmar Givoni is the Director of Machine Learning at Kindred, a Toronto based startup, where her team develops algorithms for machine intelligence, at the intersection of robotics and AI. Prior to that, she was the VP of Big Data at Kobo, where she led her team in applying machine learning and big data techniques to drive e-commerce, customer satisfaction, CRM, and personalization in the e-pubs and e-readers business. She first joined Kobo in 2013 as a senior research scientist working on content analysis, website optimization, and reading modelling among other things. Prior to that, Inmar was a member of technical staff at Altera where she worked on optimization algorithms for cutting-edge programmable logic devices.

Inmar received her PhD (Computer Science) in 2011 from the University of Toronto, specializing in machine learning, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge. During her graduate studies, she worked at Microsoft Research, applying machine learning approaches for e-commerce optimization for Bing, and for pose-estimation in the Kinect gaming system. She holds a BSc in computer science and computational biology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is an inventor of several patents and has authored numerous top-tier academic publications in the areas of machine learning, computer vision, and computational biology. She is a regular speaker at big data, analytics, and machine learning events, and is particularly interested in outreach activities for young women, encouraging them to choose technical career paths.

Andres Rodriguez, Intel

Catalyzing Deep Learning’s Impact in the Enterprise

Deep learning is unlocking tremendous economic value across various market sectors. Individual data scientists can draw from several open source frameworks and basic hardware resources during the very initial investigative phases but quickly require significant hardware and software resources to build and deploy production models. Intel offers various software and hardware to support a diversity of workloads and user needs. Intel Nervana delivers a competitive deep learning platform to make it easy for data scientists to start from the iterative, investigatory phase and take models all the way to deployment. This platform is designed for speed and scale, and serves as a catalyst for all types of organizations to benefit from the full potential of deep learning. Example of supported applications include but not limited to automotive speech interfaces, image search, language translation, agricultural robotics and genomics, financial document summarization, and finding anomalies in IoT data.

Andres Rodriguez is a deep learning solutions architect with Intel Nervana where he designs deep learning solutions for Intel’s customers and provides technical leadership across Intel for deep learning. Andres received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University for his research in machine learning, and prior to joining Intel, he was a deep learning research scientist with the Air Force Research Laboratory. He holds over 20 peer reviewed publications in journals and conferences, and a book chapter on machine learning.

Avidan Akerib, GSI Technology

In-Place Computing: High-Performance Search

This presentation details an in-place associative computing technology that changes the concept of computing from serial data processing—where data is moved back and forth between the processor and memory—to massive parallel data processing, compute, and search in-place directly in the main processing array. This in-place associative computing technology removes the bottleneck at the IO between the processor and memory, resulting in significant performance-over-power ratio improvement compared to conventional methods that use CPU and GPGPU (General Purpose GPU) along with DRAM. Target applications include, convolutional neural networks, recommender systems for e-commerce, and data mining tasks such as prediction, classification, and clustering.

Avidan Akerib is VP of the Associative Computing business unit at GSI Technology. He holds a PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science where he developed the theory of associative computing and applications for image processing and graphics. Avidan has over 30 years of experience in parallel computing, image processing and pattern recognition, and associative processing. He holds over 20 patents related to parallel computing and associative processing.