What I Learned From Attending REWORK MLOps and ML Fairness Summits

What I Learned From Attending REWORK MLOps and ML Fairness Summits

Last month, I attended two great summits organized by REWORK: The MLOps summit that discovers how to optimize the ML lifecycle & streamline ML pipeline for better production and the ML Fairness summit that discovers strategies to ensure ML models are accountable & fair to build secure & responsible AI. As a previous attendee of REWORK’s in-person summit, I have always enjoyed the unique mix of academia and industry, enabling attendees to meet with AI pioneers at the forefront of research and explore real-world case studies to discover the business value of AI.

In this long-form blog recap, I will dissect content from the talks that I found most useful from attending the summit. The post consists of 10 talks that range from automated data labeling and pipeline optimization, to model fairness and responsible AI at scale.

Datacast Episode 66: Monitoring Models in Production with Emeli Dral

Datacast Episode 66: Monitoring Models in Production with Emeli Dral

Emeli Dral is a Co-founder and CTO at Evidently AI, a startup developing tools to analyze and monitor the performance of machine learning models. Earlier, she co-founded an industrial AI startup and served as the Chief Data Scientist at Yandex Data Factory. She led over 50 applied ML projects for various industries - from banking to manufacturing. Emeli is also a data science lecturer at St. Petersburg State Management School and Harbour.Space University. She is a co-author of the Machine Learning and Data Analysis curriculum at Coursera with over 100,000 students. She also co-founded Data Mining in Action, the largest open data science course in Russia.

Datacast Episode 65: Chaos Theory, High-Frequency Trading, and Experimentations at Scale with David Sweet

Datacast Episode 65: Chaos Theory, High-Frequency Trading, and Experimentations at Scale with David Sweet

David Sweet was a quantitative trader at GETCO, where he used experimental methods to tune trading strategies, and a machine learning engineer at Instagram, where he experimented on a large-scale recommender system. He is currently writing a book called "Tuning Up," an extension of lectures given at NYU Stern on tuning high-frequency trading systems. Before working in the industry, he received a Ph.D. in Physics and published research in Physical Review Letters and Nature. The latter publication – an experiment demonstrating chaos in geometrical optics -- has become a source of inspiration for computer graphics artists, undergraduate Physics instructors, and an exhibit called TetraSphere at the Museum of Mathematics in New York City.

Datacast Episode 64: Improving Access to High-Quality Data with Fabiana Clemente

Datacast Episode 64: Improving Access to High-Quality Data with Fabiana Clemente

Fabiana Clemente is a Data Scientist with a background that ranges from Business Intelligence to Big Data Development and IoT architecture. Throughout her professional career, she has been leading state-of-the-art projects in global companies and startups. She has an academic background in Applied Maths, and MSc in Data Management combined with nano degrees in Deep Learning and Secure and Private AI.

As YData’s Co-Founder, she combines Data Privacy with Deep Learning as her main field of work and research, with the mission to unlock data with privacy by design. She also aims to inspire more women to follow her steps and join the tech community.

What I Learned From Attending REWORK AI Applications Summit 2021

What I Learned From Attending REWORK AI Applications Summit 2021

Last month, I attended REWORK’s AI Applications Virtual Summit, which discovers machine learning tools and techniques to improve the financial, retail, and insurance experience. As a previous attendee of REWORK’s in-person summit, I have always enjoyed the unique mix of academia and industry, enabling attendees to meet with AI pioneers at the forefront of research and explore real-world case studies to discover the business value of AI.

In this long-form blog recap, I will dissect content from the talks that I found most useful from attending the summit. The post consists of 13 talks that are divided into 3 sections: (1) AI in Finance and RegTech, (2) AI in Retail and Marketing, and (3) AI in Insurance.

Datacast Episode 63: Real-World Transfer Learning with Azin Asgarian

Datacast Episode 63: Real-World Transfer Learning with Azin Asgarian

Azin Asgarian is currently an applied research scientist on Georgian’s R&D team, where she works with companies to help adopt applied research techniques to overcome business challenges. Azin holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of Tehran. Before joining Georgian, Azin was a research assistant at the University of Toronto and part of the Computer Vision Group, where she worked on the intersection of Machine Learning, Transfer Learning, and Computer Vision. In addition, due to her interest in HealthCare, she has worked on various healthcare projects as a research assistant at University Health Network.

What I Learned From Attending Tecton's apply() Conference

What I Learned From Attending Tecton's apply() Conference

Last week, I attended apply(), Tecton’s first-ever conference that brought together industry thought leaders and practitioners from over 30 organizations to share and discuss ML data engineering’s current and future state. The complexity of ML data engineering is the most significant barrier between most data teams and transforming their applications and user experiences with operational ML.


In this long-form blog recap, I will dissect content from 23 sessions and lightning talks that I found most useful from attending apply(). These talks cover everything from the rise of feature stores and the evolution of MLOps, to novel techniques and scalable platform design. Let’s dive in!

Datacast Episode 62: Leading Organizations Through Analytics Transformations with Gordon Wong

Datacast Episode 62: Leading Organizations Through Analytics Transformations with Gordon Wong

As a data modeling fanatic, data warehouse architect, multi-hypergrowth startup veteran, and team builder, Gordon has built his career on helping people get their business questions. Over time, he's switched his focus from pure technology to complete solutions where people, process, and technology all play a role. At Fitbit, he established the data warehousing team and, as an early customer of Snowflake, used it to fuel petabyte-scale analytics. Later on, at both ezCater and Hubspot, he rebuilt the data warehousing teams to focus on enabling analysts, not loading more data. A constant focus on the customer and their problems has led him to realize that empathy is the most important trait a leader can have.

Datacast Episode 61: Meta Reinforcement Learning with Louis Kirsch

Datacast Episode 61: Meta Reinforcement Learning with Louis Kirsch

Louis Kirsch is a third-year Ph.D. student at the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, advised by Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber. He received his B.Sc. in IT-Systems-Engineering from Hasso-Plattner-Institute (1st rank) and his Master of Research in Computational Statistics and Machine Learning from University College London (1st rank). His research focuses on meta-learning algorithms for reinforcement learning, specifically meta-learning algorithms that are general-purpose, introduced by his work on MetaGenRL. Louis has organized the BeTR-RL workshop at ICLR 2020, was an invited speaker at Meta Learn NeurIPS 2020, and won several GPU compute awards for the Swiss national supercomputer Piz Daint.

What I Learned From Attending Scale Transform 2021

What I Learned From Attending Scale Transform 2021

A few weeks ago, I attended Transform, Scale AI’s first-ever conference that brought together an all-star line-up of the leading AI researchers and practitioners. The conference featured 19 sessions discussing the latest research breakthroughs and real-world impact across industries.

In this long-form blog recap, I will dissect content from the session talks that I found most useful from attending the conference. These talks cover everything from the future of ML frameworks and the importance of a data-centric mindset to AI applications at companies like Facebook and DoorDash. To be honest, the conference's quality was so amazing, and it’s hard to choose the talks to recap.