Alex Brokaw, Freelance

Alex Brokaw is a writer and consultant based in New York City. He spent many years as a finance and technology reporter, most recently at The Verge. He now specializes in writing and creative services for artificial intelligence and robotics companies. Alex is passionate about helping these companies explain their technologies to customers and larger audiences, whether that’s through technical writing, marketing copy, or overall brand and marketing strategy.

Nick Pentreath, IBM

End-to-end Machine Intelligence

The common perception of machine learning is that it starts with data and ends with a model. In real-world production systems, the traditional data science and machine learning workflow of data preparation, feature engineering and model selection, while important, is only one aspect. True machine intelligence requires continuous, real-time learning by closing the feedback loop. Equally important for enterprise-grade and mission-critical systems are the typical elements of software systems, such as scalability, fault tolerance and security.

Nick is a Principal Engineer at IBM’s Spark Technology Center. He is a member of the Apache Spark PMC and author of Machine Learning with Spark. Previously, he co-founded Graphflow, a startup focused on recommendations and customer intelligence. He has worked at Goldman Sachs, Cognitive Match, and led the Data Science team at Mxit, Africa’s largest social network. He is passionate about combining commercial focus with machine learning and cutting-edge technology to build intelligent systems that learn from data to add business value.

Suzanne Gildert, Kindred

On the Path to Non-Biological Sentience

At Kindred our mission is to create human-like intelligence in machines, and our core hypothesis is that intelligence requires a body. We build robotic bodies of many different form factors and imbue them with new types of AI minds inspired by biological creatures’ brains. We pre-train these algorithms by demonstration, using large amounts of data from human operators, and craft reward functions such that the entities can subsequently become fully autonomous agents. Breakthroughs in robotics, increases in computational power, and advancements in machine learning algorithms are finally enabling us to train AI minds to have a more “general” form of intelligence. This presentation will describe our technology and address some of the questions that might arise as we begin to share our world with increasingly smarter robots.

Suzanne is co-founder and CSO of Kindred. She oversees the design and engineering of the company's human-like robots and is responsible for the development of cognitive architectures that allow these robots to learn about themselves and their environments. Before founding Kindred, Suzanne worked as a physicist at D-Wave, designing and building superconducting quantum processors, and as a researcher in quantum artificial intelligence software applications. Suzanne likes science outreach, retro tech art, coffee, cats, electronic music and extreme lifelogging. She is a published author of a book of art and poetry. She is passionate about robots and their role as a new form of symbiotic life in our society. Suzanne received her Ph.D. in experimental physics from the University of Birmingham (UK) in 2008, specializing in quantum device physics, microfabrication techniques, and low-temperature measurements of novel superconducting circuits.

Mihajlo Grbovic, Airbnb

Search Ranking And Personalization at Airbnb

Search ranking is a fundamental problem of crucial interest to major Internet companies, including web search engines, content publishing websites and marketplaces. However, despite sharing some common characteristics a one-size-fits-all solution does not exist in this space. Given a large difference in content that needs to be ranked and the parties affected by ranking, each search ranking problem is somewhat specific. Correspondingly, search ranking at Airbnb is quite unique, being a two-sided marketplace in which one needs to optimize for host and guest preferences, in a world where a user rarely consumes the same item twice and one listing can accept only one guest for a certain set of dates. In this talk, I will discuss challenges we have encountered and Machine Learning solutions we have developed for listing ranking at Airbnb. Specifically, the listing ranking problem boils down to prioritizing listings that are appealing to the guest but at the same time demoting listings tha t would likely reject the guest, which is not easily solvable using basic matrix completion or a straightforward linear model. I will shed the light on how we jointly optimize the two objectives by leveraging listing quality, location relevance, reviews, host response time as well as guest and host preferences and past booking history. Finally, we will talk about our recent work on using neural network models to train listing, query and user embeddings for purposes of enhancing search relevance and personalization, two core concepts in any modern search.

Mihajlo Grbovic, Ph.D. is a Senior Machine Learning Scientist on the Search Ranking Team at Airbnb. Prior to that, he was a Senior Research Manager at Yahoo Labs working on Advertising Sciences. He has more than 10 years of technical experience in applied Machine Learning, acting as a Science Lead in a portfolio of advertising technology projects on Monetization of Tumblr, Yahoo Email and Yahoo Search. Some of his biggest accomplishments include building a large scale Interest and Gender Targeting Pipeline for Tumblr, training Email Classifiers used in Yahoo Mail Smart Views that millions of people interact with every day, and introducing the next generation query-ad matching algorithm to Yahoo Sponsored Search. Dr. Grbovic published more than 40 peer-reviewed publications at top Machine Learning and Web Science Conferences and co-authored more than 10 pending patents. His work was featured in Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, MIT Technology Review, Popular Science and Market Watch.

Prabhat, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Deep Learning for Climate Science

Climate change is one of the most important problems facing humanity in the 21st century. Climate simulations provide us with a unique opportunity to understand the evolution of the climate system subject to various CO2 emission scenarios. Unfortunately, large scale climate simulations produce 100TB-sized spatio-temporal, multi-variate datasets, making it difficult to conduct sophisticated analytics. In this talk, I will present our results in applying Deep Learning for semi-supervised learning of extreme weather patterns. I will conclude with a summary of current applications of Deep Learning for a broad set of scientific use cases, and open research challenges for the future.

Prabhat leads the Data and Analytics Services team at NERSC. His current research interests applied statistics, machine learning, and high performance computing. He has worked on topics in scientific data management, parallel I/O, scientific visualization, computer graphics and computer vision in the past. Prabhat received an ScM in Computer Science from Brown University (2001) and a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT-Delhi (1999). He is currently pursuing a PhD in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at U.C. Berkeley.

Hanie Sedghi, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Beating Perils of Non-convexity: Guaranteed Training of Neural Networks using Tensor Methods

Neural networks have revolutionized performance across multiple domains such as computer vision and speech recognition. However, training a neural network is a highly non-convex problem and the conventional stochastic gradient descent can get stuck in spurious local optima. We propose a computationally efficient method for training neural networks that also has guaranteed risk bounds. It is based on tensor decomposition which is guaranteed to converge to the globally optimal solution under mild conditions. We explain how this framework can be leveraged to train feedforward and recurrent neural networks.

Hanie Sedghi is a Research Scientist at Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2). Her research interests include large-scale machine learning, high-dimensional statistics and probabilistic models. More recently, she has been working on inference and learning in latent variable models. She has received her Ph.D. from University of Southern California with a minor in Mathematics in 2015. She was also a visiting researcher at University of California, Irvine working with professor Anandkumar during her Ph.D. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.

Melody Guan, Google Brain

Who Said What: Modeling individual Labelers Improves Classification

Data are often labeled by many different experts, with each expert labeling a small fraction of the data and each sample receiving multiple labels. When experts disagree, the standard approaches are to treat the majority opinion as the truth or to model the truth as a distribution, but these do not make any use of potentially valuable information about which expert produced which label. We propose modeling the experts individually and then learning averaging weights for combining them, possibly in sample-specific ways. This allows us to give more weight to more reliable experts and take advantage of the unique strengths of individual experts at classifying certain types of data. We show that our approach performs better than three competing methods in computer-aided diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy.

Melody is a deep learning resident at Google Brain. Previously she interned as a trader at D. E. Shaw and conducted stem cell research in Doug Melton's lab. She received an M.A. in Statistics and B.A. in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard University, where she graduated with highest ranking. In her youth she medalled at the International Physics, Chemistry, and Biology Olympiads and was invited to the Canadian International Math Olympiad training camp. Melody has published in The Huffington Post, Harvard Political Review, and The Harvard Crimson. She is constantly fawning over music, reading rationality and psychoanalysis blogs, and enjoying long random walks along undirected paths and other outdoor activities.

Abi Komma, Uber

An Application of Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) for Query Runtime Prediction

In 2016, Uber's went through an exponential growth. To support such an unprecedented growth in business, Uber had to rapidly scale out its infrastructure. The rapid growth in the core business and the number of products offered by Uber coupled with an increase in the number of data scientists and analysts meant an increasing load on our data systems. Specifically, having a stable and an efficient data warehouse was a fundamental requirement to sustain the pace at which Uber was growing and operating in the marketplace. The starting point of every data-driven decision at Uber typically begins with fetching data using our internal web-based tool called Querybuilder. More than 150K SQL queries are issued every week on our data warehouse through Querybuilder. To manage this load efficiently, it is very important to be able to accurately predict the runtime of the query before it hits the warehouse. In this study, we share our approach on how we used a Gradient Boosted Decision Tree model for predicting the runtime class of a query (short query or long query). Further, the predicted label was used to route the incoming query into an appropriate queue for execution in real-time. This approach of routing the queries based on the predictions from the classifier increased the overall efficiency of our warehouse. We observed a significant decrease in the average waiting for a query execution and increased the throughput of our system under peak load.

Abi Komma is a Senior Data Scientist in the Applied Machine Learning group at Uber. He focuses on applying regression, classification, and survival analysis techniques to build predictive models for various business problems at Uber. He holds a Master's degree in Transportation Engineering from University of Florida and a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.

Zornitsa Kozareva, Amazon

What Do Users Want? Using Semantics to Predict User Intents at Scale

Over the years search paradigm has shifted from document retrieval to deeper user intent understanding. Today’s users are no longer satisfied with seeing a list of relevant documents, instead they want to complete tasks and take actions on them. The question I will address in this talk is how to build an automated user intent understanding system, where given a query like "Mia" the user sees relevant and personalized recommendations such as "buy latest album of the singer”, or "check-in flight to Miami". I will begin by introducing the task and the main challenges with semantic understanding. Then, I will describe categorization and structured prediction algorithms for entity detection and intent prediction. Finally, I will highlight results and findings for user intent prediction from shopping, movies, restaurant and sport domains.

Dr. Zornitsa Kozareva is a Manager at Amazon leading the Natural Language Processing group. Before that she was a Senior Manager at Yahoo! leading the Query Processing group that powers Mobile Search and Advertisement. From 2009 to 2014, Dr. Kozareva was a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California and a Research Scientist at the Information Sciences Institute. Her interests lie in Web-based knowledge acquisition, semantics, ontology population, multilingual information extraction and sentiment analysis. Dr. Kozareva regularly serves as Area Chair and PC of top tier NLP conferences. She has organized four SemEval scientific challenges and has published over 60 research papers. Dr. Kozareva is a recipient of the John Atanasoff Award given by the President of Republic of Bulgaria in 2016 for her contributions and impact in science, education and industry; the Yahoo! Labs Excellence Award in 2014 and the RANLP Young Scientist Award in 2011.

Hossein Taghavi, Netflix

Balancing Discovery & Continuation in Recommendations

When a member logs on to Netflix, she may be in one or a combination of different watching modes: discovering a new content, continuing to watch a partially-watched movie or a TV show, playing one of the contents she had put in her play list during an earlier session, etc. If, for example, we can reasonably predict when a member is more likely to be in the continuation mode, and which videos she is more likely to resume, it makes sense to place those videos in more prominent places of the home page. In this talk we focus on understanding the discovery vs. continuation behavior and explain how we have used machine learning to improve the member experience by learning a personalized balance between those two modes.

Hossein Taghavi received the B.Sc. degree from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2003, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, in 2008, in electrical engineering. From 2008 to 2011, he was with Qualcomm, Inc. in San Diego, CA, conducting research and development on algorithms and systems for wireless networks. From 2011 to 2013, he was with Opera Solutions, LLC., in San Diego, CA, applying machine learning and data analytics to a variety of business applications. Since 2013, he has been with Netflix, Inc., contributing to algorithms and software driving the personalization and recommendation systems for Netflix members. His current interests include machine learning, recommendation systems, and distributed computing.

Robinson Piramuthu, NPD, eBay Inc.

Elements of Machine Intelligence for Visual eCommerce

Recent developments in deep learning has helped computer vision to harness the information in large image data collections and be viable for practical applications. Although computer vision has huge potential for commerce, only a small portion of it has been materialized. In this talk, we will present various elementary components that enable machine intelligence using computer vision. This includes image quality, visual search, segmentation, pose estimation, iris/face recognition, coarse and fine grained prediction.

Robinson Piramuthu is currently head of “AI - Computer Vision” at the New Product Development organization at eBay Inc. He has over 20 years of experience in computer vision. Robinson joined eBay Research Labs in 2011 and was later head of the computer vision team, which specialized in computer vision research for visual commerce. Robinson has technical publications at top conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, KDD, WSDM, WACV, ICIP. He co-organized the workshop on Large Scale Visual Commerce at ICCV ’13 Sydney and at CVPR ’15. He received his PhD from University of Michigan Ann Arbor in 2000.

Junhyuk Oh, University of Michigan

Control of Memory, Active Perception, and Action in 3D world

In this work, we introduce a set of reinforcement learning tasks in Minecraft. We use these tasks to systematically compare existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) architectures with our new memory-based architectures. These tasks are designed to emphasize issues that pose challenges including partial observability, delayed rewards, high-dimensional visual observations, and the need to use active perception so as to perform well in the tasks. We evaluate the generalization performance of the architectures on environments not used during training. The experimental results show that our new architectures generalize to unseen environments better than existing DRL architectures.

Junhyuk is a 2rd-year PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering at University of Michigan. He is working on the intersection between deep learning and reinforcement learning under the supervision of Professor Honglak Lee and Professor Satinder Singh.

Nick Gaylord, CrowdFlower

Nick is a Senior Data Scientist at CrowdFlower, where he works primarily to help build their new machine learning offering, CrowdFlower AI. Prior to CrowdFlower, he worked as a data scientist at SF text analytics startup Idibon. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, where his research focused on human language comprehension and the construction of datasets for NLP applications. In his spare time he fixes bikes and collaborates on work applying cognitive science principles to the public health domain.

Kevin Hightower, AirMap

Kevin is responsible for the global capabilities of the AirMap product portfolio. His responsibilities include defining strategic and tactical capabilities roadmaps, managing the product team, and coordinating with the various development teams. Kevin joined AirMap after 15 years with Lockheed Martin working on Air Traffic Control systems as a Systems Architect and working as the Aviation Chief Technologist for all global aviation projects.

Chris Slowe, Reddit

As the founding engineer of Reddit, Chris Slowe helped build it, sell it, and has recently come back with the other co-founders to fix it. Though a software engineer by vocation, his first attempt at a career started with his finishing a PhD in experimental physics where he learned about the importance of modeling, critical thinking, statistics, and (honestly) welding. He uses the first three skills regularly. Chris currently acts as Director of Foundation Engineering at Reddit, Inc.

Nick Pentreath, IBM

This discussion will center around best practices, key challenges and “war stories” for turning data science and machine learning projects into production systems. Some key questions that we'll discuss include:

How to go from exploratory data science and “proof of concept” projects to production systems with all their requirements of scalability, fault tolerance, performance monitoring & feedback?

How to bridge the gaps between the teams involved in each aspect of the Data Product Continuum, and the differing requirements of each phase?

What are some of the best practices in productionizing data science and machine learning workflows?

What role do standards play (e.g. data interchange formats, model evaluation standards such as PMML and PFA)?

What is the state of systems catering to this need, whether open-source or proprietary?

What are the important tools and software systems?

What are the important processes and non-software systems?

What are practitioners currently using in their production systems? How have they solved these problems and what are the “pro tips” and “lessons learnt” that can be shared?

Erik Schmidt, Pandora

Music Discovery at Pandora

Finding the music of the moment can often be a challenging problem, even for humans with well-versed musical tastes. These challenges further explode into a myriad of complexities when attempting to construct algorithmic approaches for automatic playlist generation. A variety of factors play a role in influencing a listener’s perception of what music is appropriate on a given seed (e.g., musicological, social, geographical, generational), and these factors vary across different contexts and listeners. The talk will present an overview of recommendation at Pandora, followed by a deep dive into the challenges of recommending content in the long tail.

Erik Schmidt is a Senior Scientist at Pandora. Most recently, he led the development of Thumbprint Radio, a hyper-personalized product that has attracted over 20 million listeners to date. He has contributed numerous recommendation strategies to the Pandora ecosystem spanning playlists, station discovery, and concerts. Before joining Pandora, Schmidt was a postdoctoral researcher in the Music and Entertainment Technology Laboratory (MET-lab) at Drexel University in Philadelphia. His general research interests lie in the areas of machine learning, recommendation systems, and digital signal processing.

Amy Gershkoff, Ancestry

Is Your Organization Ready for ML?

As data science has become increasingly popular, many organizations rush to hire ML experts without laying the proper foundation to ensure their success, including creating proper database architecture, building out essential data science technology, establishing data governance, and instilling data-driven decision-making throughout the organization. Absent these elements, many ML experts join companies excited to deploy their data science expertise only to end up marred in data cleaning or lobbying for tech resources. In this presentation, I discuss how organizations can prepare their organization for success, as well as how candidates can diagnose whether the organization is truly ready for ML.

Dr. Gershkoff is Chief Data Officer for Ancestry, which specializes in genealogy and consumer genomics. Previously, she was Chief Data Officer at Zynga. During her career, she has led the Customer Analytics & Insights team at eBay, served as Chief Data Scientist at WPP, and was Head of Media Planning at Obama for America, where she designed the campaign’s advertising and analytics strategy. Gershkoff was named one of America’s “40 Under 40” leading entrepreneurs, one of the Top 50 Women to Watch in Tech, and one of San Francisco's Most Influential Women in Business. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University.