Recommendations for Building Machine Learning Software: Building a real system that uses machine learning can be a difficult both in terms of the algorithmic and engineering challenges involved. In this talk, I will focus on the engineering side and discuss some of the practical lessons we’ve learned from years of developing the machine learning systems that power Netflix. I will go over what it takes to get machine learning working in a real-life feedback loop with our users and how that imposes different requirements and a different focus than doing machine learning only within a lab environment. This involves lessons around challenges such as where to place algorithmic components, how to handle distribution and parallelism, what kinds of modularity are useful, how to support both production experimentation, and how to test machine learning systems.
Separating Hype from Reality in Deep Learning with Sameer FarooquiDatabricks
Deep Learning is all the rage these days, but where does the reality of what Deep Learning can do end and the media hype begin? In this talk, I will dispel common myths about Deep Learning that are not necessarily true and help you decide whether you should practically use Deep Learning in your software stack.
I’ll begin with a technical overview of common neural network architectures like CNNs, RNNs, GANs and their common use cases like computer vision, language understanding or unsupervised machine learning. Then I’ll separate the hype from reality around questions like:
• When should you prefer traditional ML systems like scikit learn or Spark.ML instead of Deep Learning?
• Do you no longer need to do careful feature extraction and standardization if using Deep Learning?
• Do you really need terabytes of data when training neural networks or can you ‘steal’ pre-trained lower layers from public models by using transfer learning?
• How do you decide which activation function (like ReLU, leaky ReLU, ELU, etc) or optimizer (like Momentum, AdaGrad, RMSProp, Adam, etc) to use in your neural network?
• Should you randomly initialize the weights in your network or use more advanced strategies like Xavier or He initialization?
• How easy is it to overfit/overtrain a neural network and what are the common techniques to ovoid overfitting (like l1/l2 regularization, dropout and early stopping)?
In the last several months, MLflow has introduced significant platform enhancements that simplify machine learning lifecycle management. Expanded autologging capabilities, including a new integration with scikit-learn, have streamlined the instrumentation and experimentation process in MLflow Tracking. Additionally, schema management functionality has been incorporated into MLflow Models, enabling users to seamlessly inspect and control model inference APIs for batch and real-time scoring. In this session, we will explore these new features. We will share MLflow’s development roadmap, providing an overview of near-term advancements in the platform.
Netflix success is credited to pioneering ways that the company introduced AI and ML into its products, services and infrastructure. ML learning is applied to solve a wide range of problems at Netflix.
CI/CD for Machine Learning with Daniel KobranDatabricks
What we call the public cloud was developed primarily to manage and deploy web servers. The target audience for these products is Dev Ops. While this is a massive and exciting market, the world of Data Science and Deep Learning is very different — and possibly even bigger. Unfortunately, the tools available today are not designed for this new audience and the cloud needs to evolve. This talk would cover what the next 10 years of cloud computing will look like.
Separating Hype from Reality in Deep Learning with Sameer FarooquiDatabricks
Deep Learning is all the rage these days, but where does the reality of what Deep Learning can do end and the media hype begin? In this talk, I will dispel common myths about Deep Learning that are not necessarily true and help you decide whether you should practically use Deep Learning in your software stack.
I’ll begin with a technical overview of common neural network architectures like CNNs, RNNs, GANs and their common use cases like computer vision, language understanding or unsupervised machine learning. Then I’ll separate the hype from reality around questions like:
• When should you prefer traditional ML systems like scikit learn or Spark.ML instead of Deep Learning?
• Do you no longer need to do careful feature extraction and standardization if using Deep Learning?
• Do you really need terabytes of data when training neural networks or can you ‘steal’ pre-trained lower layers from public models by using transfer learning?
• How do you decide which activation function (like ReLU, leaky ReLU, ELU, etc) or optimizer (like Momentum, AdaGrad, RMSProp, Adam, etc) to use in your neural network?
• Should you randomly initialize the weights in your network or use more advanced strategies like Xavier or He initialization?
• How easy is it to overfit/overtrain a neural network and what are the common techniques to ovoid overfitting (like l1/l2 regularization, dropout and early stopping)?
In the last several months, MLflow has introduced significant platform enhancements that simplify machine learning lifecycle management. Expanded autologging capabilities, including a new integration with scikit-learn, have streamlined the instrumentation and experimentation process in MLflow Tracking. Additionally, schema management functionality has been incorporated into MLflow Models, enabling users to seamlessly inspect and control model inference APIs for batch and real-time scoring. In this session, we will explore these new features. We will share MLflow’s development roadmap, providing an overview of near-term advancements in the platform.
Netflix success is credited to pioneering ways that the company introduced AI and ML into its products, services and infrastructure. ML learning is applied to solve a wide range of problems at Netflix.
CI/CD for Machine Learning with Daniel KobranDatabricks
What we call the public cloud was developed primarily to manage and deploy web servers. The target audience for these products is Dev Ops. While this is a massive and exciting market, the world of Data Science and Deep Learning is very different — and possibly even bigger. Unfortunately, the tools available today are not designed for this new audience and the cloud needs to evolve. This talk would cover what the next 10 years of cloud computing will look like.
Josh Patterson, Advisor, Skymind – Deep learning for Industry at MLconf ATL 2016MLconf
DL4J and DataVec for Enterprise Deep Learning Workflows: Applications in NLP, sensor processing (IoT), image processing, and audio processing have all emerged as prime deep learning applications. In this session we will take a look at a practical review of building practical and secure Deep Learning workflows in the enterprise. We’ll see how DL4J’s DataVec tool enables scalable ETL and vectorization pipelines to be created for a single machine or scale out to Spark on Hadoop. We’ll also see how Deep Networks such as Recurrent Neural Networks are able to leverage DataVec to more quickly process data for modeling.
Kaz Sato, Evangelist, Google at MLconf ATL 2016MLconf
Machine Intelligence at Google Scale: Tensor Flow and Cloud Machine Learning: The biggest challenge of Deep Learning technology is the scalability. As long as using single GPU server, you have to wait for hours or days to get the result of your work. This doesn’t scale for production service, so you need a Distributed Training on the cloud eventually. Google has been building infrastructure for training the large scale neural network on the cloud for years, and now started to share the technology with external developers. In this session, we will introduce new pre-trained ML services such as Cloud Vision API and Speech API that works without any training. Also, we will look how TensorFlow and Cloud Machine Learning will accelerate custom model training for 10x – 40x with Google’s distributed training infrastructure.
Nikhil Garg, Engineering Manager, Quora at MLconf SF 2016MLconf
Building a Machine Learning Platform at Quora: Each month, over 100 million people use Quora to share and grow their knowledge. Machine learning has played a critical role in enabling us to grow to this scale, with applications ranging from understanding content quality to identifying users’ interests and expertise. By investing in a reusable, extensible machine learning platform, our small team of ML engineers has been able to productionize dozens of different models and algorithms that power many features across Quora.
In this talk, I’ll discuss the core ideas behind our ML platform, as well as some of the specific systems, tools, and abstractions that have enabled us to scale our approach to machine learning.
MALT: Distributed Data-Parallelism for Existing ML Applications (Distributed ...asimkadav
Machine learning methods, such as SVM and neural net- works, often improve their accuracy by using models with more parameters trained on large numbers of examples. Building such models on a single machine is often impracti- cal because of the large amount of computation required.
We introduce MALT, a machine learning library that inte- grates with existing machine learning software and provides data parallel machine learning. MALT provides abstractions for fine-grained in-memory updates using one-sided RDMA, limiting data movement costs during incremental model up- dates. MALT allows machine learning developers to specify the dataflow and apply communication and representation optimizations. Through its general-purpose API, MALT can be used to provide data-parallelism to existing ML appli- cations written in C++ and Lua and based on SVM, ma- trix factorization and neural networks. In our results, we show MALT provides fault tolerance, network efficiency and speedup to these applications.
Scaling Ride-Hailing with Machine Learning on MLflowDatabricks
"GOJEK, the Southeast Asian super-app, has seen an explosive growth in both users and data over the past three years. Today the technology startup uses big data powered machine learning to inform decision-making in its ride-hailing, lifestyle, logistics, food delivery, and payment products. From selecting the right driver to dispatch, to dynamically setting prices, to serving food recommendations, to forecasting real-world events. Hundreds of millions of orders per month, across 18 products, are all driven by machine learning.
Building production grade machine learning systems at GOJEK wasn't always easy. Data processing and machine learning pipelines were brittle, long running, and had low reproducibility. Models and experiments were difficult to track, which led to downstream problems in production during serving and model evaluation. In this talk we will cover these and other challenges that we faced while trying to scale end-to-end machine learning systems at GOJEK. We will then introduce MLflow and explore the key features that make it useful as part of an ML platform. Finally, we will show how introducing MLflow into the ML life cycle has helped to solve many of the problems we faced while scaling machine learning at GOJEK.
"
From Pipelines to Refineries: scaling big data applications with Tim HunterDatabricks
Big data tools are challenging to combine into a larger application: ironically, big data applications themselves do not tend to scale very well. These issues of integration and data management are only magnified by increasingly large volumes of data. Apache Spark provides strong building blocks for batch processes, streams and ad-hoc interactive analysis. However, users face challenges when putting together a single coherent pipeline that could involve hundreds of transformation steps, especially when confronted by the need of rapid iterations. This talk explores these issues through the lens of functional programming. It presents an experimental framework that provides full-pipeline guarantees by introducing more laziness to Apache Spark. This framework allows transformations to be seamlessly composed and alleviates common issues, thanks to whole program checks, auto-caching, and aggressive computation parallelization and reuse.
Simplify Distributed TensorFlow Training for Fast Image Categorization at Sta...Databricks
"In addition to the many data engineering initiatives at Starbucks, we are also working on many interesting data science initatives. The business scenarios involved in our deep learning initatives include (but are not limited to) planogram analysis (layout of our stores for efficient partner and customer flow) to predicting product pairings (e.g. purchase a caramel machiato and perhaps you would like caramel brownie) via the product components using graph convolutional networks.
For this session, we will be focusing on how we can run distributed Keras (TensorFlow backend) training to perform image analytics. This will be combined with MLflow to showcase the data science lifecycle and how Databricks + MLflow simplifies it. "
Extending Machine Learning Algorithms with PySparkDatabricks
Machine learning practitioners are most comfortable using high-level programming languages such as Python. This is a barrier to parallelizing algorithms with big data frameworks such as Apache Spark, which are written in lower-level languages. Databricks partnered with the Regeneron Genetics Center to create the Glow library for population-scale genomics data storage and analytics. Glow V1.0.0 includes PySpark-based implementations for both existing and novel machine learning algorithms. We will discuss how leveraging tooling for Python users, especially Pandas UDFs, accelerated our development velocity and impacted our algorithms’ computational performance.
A full Machine learning pipeline in Scikit-learn vs in scala-Spark: pros and ...Jose Quesada (hiring)
The machine learning libraries in Apache Spark are an impressive piece of software engineering, and are maturing rapidly. What advantages does Spark.ml offer over scikit-learn? At Data Science Retreat we've taken a real-world dataset and worked through the stages of building a predictive model -- exploration, data cleaning, feature engineering, and model fitting; which would you use in production?
The machine learning libraries in Apache Spark are an impressive piece of software engineering, and are maturing rapidly. What advantages does Spark.ml offer over scikit-learn?
At Data Science Retreat we've taken a real-world dataset and worked through the stages of building a predictive model -- exploration, data cleaning, feature engineering, and model fitting -- in several different frameworks. We'll show what it's like to work with native Spark.ml, and compare it to scikit-learn along several dimensions: ease of use, productivity, feature set, and performance.
In some ways Spark.ml is still rather immature, but it also conveys new superpowers to those who know how to use it.
Advanced MLflow: Multi-Step Workflows, Hyperparameter Tuning and Integrating ...Databricks
Because MLflow is an API-first platform, there are many patterns for using it in complex workflows and integrating it with existing tools. In this talk, we’ll demo a few best practices for using MLflow in a more complex workflow. These include:
* Run multi-step workflows on MLflow, such as data preparation steps followed by training, and organizing your projects so you can automatically reuse past work.
* Tune Hyperparameter on MLflow with open source hyperparameter tuning packages.
* Save a model in MLflow (eg, from a new machine learning library) and deploying it to the existing deployment tools.
Navigating the ML Pipeline Jungle with MLflow: Notes from the Field with Thun...Databricks
Plumbing has been a key focus of modern software engineering, with our API/services/containers/devops driven landscape so it may come as a surprise that plumbing is where AI projects tend to fail. But it is precisely because our modern software development focuses on decoupled plumbing that we have struggled to handle the rise of AI.
Specifically, companies are able to use AI effectively when they are able to create end-to-end AI model factories that explicitly account for coupling between data, models, and code.
In this talk, I will be walking through what a model factory is and how MLFlow’s design supports the creation of end-to-end model factories as well as sharing best practices I’ve observed helping customers from startups to Fortune 50s create, productionize, and scale end-to-end ML pipelines, and watching those pipelines produce serious, game changing business impact.
Erin LeDell, Machine Learning Scientist, H2O.ai at MLconf ATL 2016MLconf
Multi-algorithm Ensemble Learning at Scale: Software, Hardware and Algorithmic Approaches: Multi-algorithm ensemble machine learning methods are often used when the true prediction function is not easily approximated by a single algorithm. The Super Learner algorithm, also known as stacking, combines multiple, typically diverse, base learning algorithms into a single, powerful prediction function through a secondary learning process called metalearning. Although ensemble methods offer superior performance over their singleton counterparts, there is an implicit computational cost to ensembles, as it requires training and cross-validating multiple base learning algorithms.
We will demonstrate a variety of software- and hardware-based approaches that lead to more scalable ensemble learning software, including a highly scalable implementation of stacking called “H2O Ensemble”, built on top of the open source, distributed machine learning platform, H2O. H2O Ensemble scales across multi-node clusters and allows the user to create ensembles of deep neural networks, Gradient Boosting Machines, Random Forest, and others. As for algorithm-based approaches, we will present two algorithmic modifications to the original stacking algorithm that further reduce computation time — Subsemble algorithm and the Online Super Learner algorithm. This talk will also include benchmarks of the implementations of these new stacking variants.
Tom Peters, Software Engineer, Ufora at MLconf ATL 2016MLconf
Say What You Mean: Scaling Machine Learning Algorithms Directly from Source Code: Scaling machine learning applications is hard. Even with powerful systems like Spark, Tensor Flow, and Theano, the code you write has more to do with getting these systems to work at all than it does with your algorithm itself. But it doesn’t have to be this way!
In this talk, I’ll discuss an alternate approach we’ve taken with Pyfora, an open-source platform for scalable machine learning and data science in Python. I’ll show how it produces efficient, large scale machine learning implementations directly from the source code of single-threaded Python programs. Instead of programming to a complex API, you can simply say what you mean and move on. I’ll show some classes of problem where this approach truly shines, discuss some practical realities of developing the system, and I’ll talk about some future directions for the project.
Josh Patterson, Advisor, Skymind – Deep learning for Industry at MLconf ATL 2016MLconf
DL4J and DataVec for Enterprise Deep Learning Workflows: Applications in NLP, sensor processing (IoT), image processing, and audio processing have all emerged as prime deep learning applications. In this session we will take a look at a practical review of building practical and secure Deep Learning workflows in the enterprise. We’ll see how DL4J’s DataVec tool enables scalable ETL and vectorization pipelines to be created for a single machine or scale out to Spark on Hadoop. We’ll also see how Deep Networks such as Recurrent Neural Networks are able to leverage DataVec to more quickly process data for modeling.
Kaz Sato, Evangelist, Google at MLconf ATL 2016MLconf
Machine Intelligence at Google Scale: Tensor Flow and Cloud Machine Learning: The biggest challenge of Deep Learning technology is the scalability. As long as using single GPU server, you have to wait for hours or days to get the result of your work. This doesn’t scale for production service, so you need a Distributed Training on the cloud eventually. Google has been building infrastructure for training the large scale neural network on the cloud for years, and now started to share the technology with external developers. In this session, we will introduce new pre-trained ML services such as Cloud Vision API and Speech API that works without any training. Also, we will look how TensorFlow and Cloud Machine Learning will accelerate custom model training for 10x – 40x with Google’s distributed training infrastructure.
Nikhil Garg, Engineering Manager, Quora at MLconf SF 2016MLconf
Building a Machine Learning Platform at Quora: Each month, over 100 million people use Quora to share and grow their knowledge. Machine learning has played a critical role in enabling us to grow to this scale, with applications ranging from understanding content quality to identifying users’ interests and expertise. By investing in a reusable, extensible machine learning platform, our small team of ML engineers has been able to productionize dozens of different models and algorithms that power many features across Quora.
In this talk, I’ll discuss the core ideas behind our ML platform, as well as some of the specific systems, tools, and abstractions that have enabled us to scale our approach to machine learning.
MALT: Distributed Data-Parallelism for Existing ML Applications (Distributed ...asimkadav
Machine learning methods, such as SVM and neural net- works, often improve their accuracy by using models with more parameters trained on large numbers of examples. Building such models on a single machine is often impracti- cal because of the large amount of computation required.
We introduce MALT, a machine learning library that inte- grates with existing machine learning software and provides data parallel machine learning. MALT provides abstractions for fine-grained in-memory updates using one-sided RDMA, limiting data movement costs during incremental model up- dates. MALT allows machine learning developers to specify the dataflow and apply communication and representation optimizations. Through its general-purpose API, MALT can be used to provide data-parallelism to existing ML appli- cations written in C++ and Lua and based on SVM, ma- trix factorization and neural networks. In our results, we show MALT provides fault tolerance, network efficiency and speedup to these applications.
Scaling Ride-Hailing with Machine Learning on MLflowDatabricks
"GOJEK, the Southeast Asian super-app, has seen an explosive growth in both users and data over the past three years. Today the technology startup uses big data powered machine learning to inform decision-making in its ride-hailing, lifestyle, logistics, food delivery, and payment products. From selecting the right driver to dispatch, to dynamically setting prices, to serving food recommendations, to forecasting real-world events. Hundreds of millions of orders per month, across 18 products, are all driven by machine learning.
Building production grade machine learning systems at GOJEK wasn't always easy. Data processing and machine learning pipelines were brittle, long running, and had low reproducibility. Models and experiments were difficult to track, which led to downstream problems in production during serving and model evaluation. In this talk we will cover these and other challenges that we faced while trying to scale end-to-end machine learning systems at GOJEK. We will then introduce MLflow and explore the key features that make it useful as part of an ML platform. Finally, we will show how introducing MLflow into the ML life cycle has helped to solve many of the problems we faced while scaling machine learning at GOJEK.
"
From Pipelines to Refineries: scaling big data applications with Tim HunterDatabricks
Big data tools are challenging to combine into a larger application: ironically, big data applications themselves do not tend to scale very well. These issues of integration and data management are only magnified by increasingly large volumes of data. Apache Spark provides strong building blocks for batch processes, streams and ad-hoc interactive analysis. However, users face challenges when putting together a single coherent pipeline that could involve hundreds of transformation steps, especially when confronted by the need of rapid iterations. This talk explores these issues through the lens of functional programming. It presents an experimental framework that provides full-pipeline guarantees by introducing more laziness to Apache Spark. This framework allows transformations to be seamlessly composed and alleviates common issues, thanks to whole program checks, auto-caching, and aggressive computation parallelization and reuse.
Simplify Distributed TensorFlow Training for Fast Image Categorization at Sta...Databricks
"In addition to the many data engineering initiatives at Starbucks, we are also working on many interesting data science initatives. The business scenarios involved in our deep learning initatives include (but are not limited to) planogram analysis (layout of our stores for efficient partner and customer flow) to predicting product pairings (e.g. purchase a caramel machiato and perhaps you would like caramel brownie) via the product components using graph convolutional networks.
For this session, we will be focusing on how we can run distributed Keras (TensorFlow backend) training to perform image analytics. This will be combined with MLflow to showcase the data science lifecycle and how Databricks + MLflow simplifies it. "
Extending Machine Learning Algorithms with PySparkDatabricks
Machine learning practitioners are most comfortable using high-level programming languages such as Python. This is a barrier to parallelizing algorithms with big data frameworks such as Apache Spark, which are written in lower-level languages. Databricks partnered with the Regeneron Genetics Center to create the Glow library for population-scale genomics data storage and analytics. Glow V1.0.0 includes PySpark-based implementations for both existing and novel machine learning algorithms. We will discuss how leveraging tooling for Python users, especially Pandas UDFs, accelerated our development velocity and impacted our algorithms’ computational performance.
A full Machine learning pipeline in Scikit-learn vs in scala-Spark: pros and ...Jose Quesada (hiring)
The machine learning libraries in Apache Spark are an impressive piece of software engineering, and are maturing rapidly. What advantages does Spark.ml offer over scikit-learn? At Data Science Retreat we've taken a real-world dataset and worked through the stages of building a predictive model -- exploration, data cleaning, feature engineering, and model fitting; which would you use in production?
The machine learning libraries in Apache Spark are an impressive piece of software engineering, and are maturing rapidly. What advantages does Spark.ml offer over scikit-learn?
At Data Science Retreat we've taken a real-world dataset and worked through the stages of building a predictive model -- exploration, data cleaning, feature engineering, and model fitting -- in several different frameworks. We'll show what it's like to work with native Spark.ml, and compare it to scikit-learn along several dimensions: ease of use, productivity, feature set, and performance.
In some ways Spark.ml is still rather immature, but it also conveys new superpowers to those who know how to use it.
Advanced MLflow: Multi-Step Workflows, Hyperparameter Tuning and Integrating ...Databricks
Because MLflow is an API-first platform, there are many patterns for using it in complex workflows and integrating it with existing tools. In this talk, we’ll demo a few best practices for using MLflow in a more complex workflow. These include:
* Run multi-step workflows on MLflow, such as data preparation steps followed by training, and organizing your projects so you can automatically reuse past work.
* Tune Hyperparameter on MLflow with open source hyperparameter tuning packages.
* Save a model in MLflow (eg, from a new machine learning library) and deploying it to the existing deployment tools.
Navigating the ML Pipeline Jungle with MLflow: Notes from the Field with Thun...Databricks
Plumbing has been a key focus of modern software engineering, with our API/services/containers/devops driven landscape so it may come as a surprise that plumbing is where AI projects tend to fail. But it is precisely because our modern software development focuses on decoupled plumbing that we have struggled to handle the rise of AI.
Specifically, companies are able to use AI effectively when they are able to create end-to-end AI model factories that explicitly account for coupling between data, models, and code.
In this talk, I will be walking through what a model factory is and how MLFlow’s design supports the creation of end-to-end model factories as well as sharing best practices I’ve observed helping customers from startups to Fortune 50s create, productionize, and scale end-to-end ML pipelines, and watching those pipelines produce serious, game changing business impact.
Erin LeDell, Machine Learning Scientist, H2O.ai at MLconf ATL 2016MLconf
Multi-algorithm Ensemble Learning at Scale: Software, Hardware and Algorithmic Approaches: Multi-algorithm ensemble machine learning methods are often used when the true prediction function is not easily approximated by a single algorithm. The Super Learner algorithm, also known as stacking, combines multiple, typically diverse, base learning algorithms into a single, powerful prediction function through a secondary learning process called metalearning. Although ensemble methods offer superior performance over their singleton counterparts, there is an implicit computational cost to ensembles, as it requires training and cross-validating multiple base learning algorithms.
We will demonstrate a variety of software- and hardware-based approaches that lead to more scalable ensemble learning software, including a highly scalable implementation of stacking called “H2O Ensemble”, built on top of the open source, distributed machine learning platform, H2O. H2O Ensemble scales across multi-node clusters and allows the user to create ensembles of deep neural networks, Gradient Boosting Machines, Random Forest, and others. As for algorithm-based approaches, we will present two algorithmic modifications to the original stacking algorithm that further reduce computation time — Subsemble algorithm and the Online Super Learner algorithm. This talk will also include benchmarks of the implementations of these new stacking variants.
Tom Peters, Software Engineer, Ufora at MLconf ATL 2016MLconf
Say What You Mean: Scaling Machine Learning Algorithms Directly from Source Code: Scaling machine learning applications is hard. Even with powerful systems like Spark, Tensor Flow, and Theano, the code you write has more to do with getting these systems to work at all than it does with your algorithm itself. But it doesn’t have to be this way!
In this talk, I’ll discuss an alternate approach we’ve taken with Pyfora, an open-source platform for scalable machine learning and data science in Python. I’ll show how it produces efficient, large scale machine learning implementations directly from the source code of single-threaded Python programs. Instead of programming to a complex API, you can simply say what you mean and move on. I’ll show some classes of problem where this approach truly shines, discuss some practical realities of developing the system, and I’ll talk about some future directions for the project.
Animashree Anandkumar, Electrical Engineering and CS Dept, UC Irvine at MLcon...MLconf
Anima Anandkumar is a faculty at the EECS Dept. at U.C.Irvine since August 2010. Her research interests are in the area of large-scale machine learning and high-dimensional statistics. She received her B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras in 2004 and her PhD from Cornell University in 2009. She has been a visiting faculty at Microsoft Research New England in 2012 and a postdoctoral researcher at the Stochastic Systems Group at MIT between 2009-2010. She is the recipient of the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, ARO Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, and IBM Fran Allen PhD fellowship.
Xavier Amatriain, VP of Engineering, Quora at MLconf SF - 11/13/15MLconf
10 More Lessons Learned from Building Real-Life ML Systems: A year ago I presented a collection of 10 lessons in MLConf. These goal of the presentation was to highlight some of the practical issues that ML practitioners encounter in the field, many of which are not included in traditional textbooks and courses. The original 10 lessons included some related to issues such as feature complexity, sampling, regularization, distributing/parallelizing algorithms, or how to think about offline vs. online computation.
Since that presentation and associated material was published, I have been asked to complement it with more/newer material. In this talk I will present 10 new lessons that not only build upon the original ones, but also relate to my recent experiences at Quora. I will talk about the importance of metrics, training data, and debuggability of ML systems. I will also describe how to combine supervised and non-supervised approaches or the role of ensembles in practical ML systems.
Narayanan Sundaram, Research Scientist, Intel Labs at MLconf SF - 11/13/15MLconf
GraphMat: Bridging the Productivity-Performance Gap in Graph Analytics: With increasing interest in large-scale distributed graph analytics for machine learning and data mining, more data scientists and developers are struggling to achieve high performance without sacrificing productivity on large graph problems. In this talk, I will discuss our solution to this problem: GraphMat. Using generalized sparse matrix-based primitives, we are able to achieve performance that is very close to hand-optimized native code, while allowing users to write programs using the familiar vertex-centric programming paradigm. I will show how we optimized GraphMat to achieve this performance on distributed platforms and provide programming examples. We have integrated GraphMat with Apache Spark in a manner that allows the combination to outperform all other distributed graph frameworks. I will explain the reasons for this performance and show that our approach achieves very high hardware efficiency in both single-node and distributed environments using primitives that are applicable to many machine learning and HPC problems. GraphMat is open source software and available for download.
IRI's Weekly News Update - w/c 20th March 2017Rūta Misiūnaitė
• Retail footfall decline continued in February
• Arla brand records biggest growth among UK’s biggest 100 grocery brands
• Which? reveals biggest supermarket substitution fails
• Automated ordering system driving improved product availability at Morrisons
• Shoppers seeking new technology to help with grocery shopping
• Majority of consumers frustrated by inconsistent retail experience
• Study by Mars reveals that emotions data can identify what impact ads will have on sales
• Lidl backs British farming
• Mother’s Day spending set to hit retail record
• Sainsbury's shutters in-store phone shops
• Tesco starts charging for same day click and collect
• Retail sales data suggests higher prices are starting to impact spending
• Direct-to-Consumer channel set for take-off in manufacturing
• Study finds that supermarkets can control shoppers' walking speed down aisles
Alessandro Magnani, Data Scientist, @WalmartLabs at MLconf SF - 11/13/15MLconf
Classification Labels in a Fast Moving Environment: Classification problems are very common in ecommerce. Collecting and storing labels from different sources is key to train and evaluate such models.
Labels are expensive to obtain, thus selecting which products to get labels for is key to optimally use any available labeling budget, both when training and evaluating a model. At the same time, if available labels are not correctly used, incorrect or suboptimal results can be produced.
In this talk I will discuss some of the challenges and potential pitfalls of acquiring and using labels for classification in a quickly evolving environment. I will present a system that store labels, provides a way to select labels to optimize budget while providing accurate and unbias evaluations of the classification models.
Sergei Vassilvitskii, Research Scientist, Google at MLconf NYC - 4/15/16MLconf
Teaching K-Means New Tricks: Over 50 years old, the k-means algorithm remains one of the most popular clustering algorithms. In this talk we’ll cover some recent developments, including better initialization, the notion of coresets, clustering at scale, and clustering with outliers.
The evolving technologies have rapidly changed the world in all sectors of education as well as economy. It has overall changed the global platform. Technology helps one to stay connected irrespective of the place and distance.
Melanie Warrick, Deep Learning Engineer, Skymind.io at MLconf SF - 11/13/15MLconf
Attention Neural Net Model Fundamentals: Neural networks have regained popularity over the last decade because they are demonstrating real world value in different applications (e.g. targeted advertising, recommender engines, Siri, self driving cars, facial recognition). Several model types are currently explored in the field with recurrent neural networks (RNN) and convolution neural networks (CNN) taking the top focus. The attention model, a recently developed RNN variant, has started to play a larger role in both natural language processing and image analysis research.
This talk will cover the fundamentals of the attention model structure and how its applied to visual and speech analysis. I will provide an overview of the model functionality and math including a high-level differentiation between soft and hard types. The goal is to give you enough of an understanding of what the model is, how it works and where to apply it.
Ben Hamner, Co-founder and CTO, Kaggle at MLconf SF - 11/13/15MLconf
Lessons learned from Running Hundreds of Kaggle Competitions: At Kaggle, we've run hundreds of machine learning competitions and seen over 80,000 data scientists make submissions. One thing is clear: winning competitions isn't random. We've learned that certain tools and methodologies work consistently well on different types of problems. Many participants make common mistakes (such as overfitting) that should be actively avoided. Similarly, competition hosts have their own set of pitfalls (such as data leakage).
In this talk, I'll share what goes into a winning competition toolkit along with some war stories on what to avoid. Additionally, I’ll share what we’re seeing on the collaborative side of competitions. Our community is showing an increasing amount of collaboration in developing machine learning models and analytic solutions. I'll showcase examples of this and discuss how these types of collaboration will improve how data science is learned and applied.
Alex Smola, Professor in the Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon Uni...MLconf
Fast, Cheap and Deep – Scaling Machine Learning: Distributed high throughput machine learning is both a challenge and a key enabling technology. Using a Parameter Server template we are able to distribute algorithms efficiently over multiple GPUs and in the cloud. This allows us to design very fast recommender systems, factorization machines, classifiers, and deep networks. This degree of scalability allows us to tackle computationally expensive problems efficiently, yielding excellent results e.g. in visual question answering.
Brad Klingenberg, Director of Styling Algorithms, Stitch Fix at MLconf SF - 1...MLconf
Combining Statistics and Expert Human Judgment for Better Recommendations: Most algorithmic recommendation engines target the consumer directly. Combining these recommendation algorithms with expert human selection and curation can make them more effective. But it also makes things more complicated. In this talk I’ll share lessons from combining statistics and human judgement for personal styling recommendations at Stitch Fix, where we are committed to our recommendations through the physical delivery of merchandise to clients. I’ll discuss both statistical and practical challenges of machine learning with humans in the loop: training with selection bias, making predictions for human consumption and measuring success.
Hussein Mehanna, Engineering Director, ML Core - Facebook at MLconf ATL 2016MLconf
Applying Deep Learning at Facebook Scale: Facebook leverages Deep Learning for various applications including event prediction, machine translation, natural language understanding and computer vision at a very large scale. There are more than a billion users logging on to Facebook every daily generating thousands of posts per second and uploading more than a billion images and videos every day. This talk will explain how Facebook scaled Deep Learning inference for realtime applications with latency budgets in the milliseconds.
Session slides from Future Insights Live, Vegas 2015:
https://futureinsightslive.com/las-vegas-2015/
There are thousands of public APIs, more than any developer could use. Instead of focusing on the quantity, this talk aims to explore the quality. Based on six years of research, Adam DuVander shares the top 11 APIs (plus a few honorable mentions). You’ll learn the factors to consider when evaluating an API and the criteria that make these 11 special. At the end of this talk you’ll have a checklist to ensure you know each API and a game plan for how to effectively put them into practice.
Lessons Learned from Building Machine Learning Software at NetflixJustin Basilico
Talk from Software Engineering for Machine Learning Workshop (SW4ML) at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 2014 conference in Montreal, Canada on 2014-12-13.
Abstract:
Building a real system that incorporates machine learning as a part can be a difficult effort, both in terms of the algorithmic and engineering challenges involved. In this talk I will focus on the engineering side and discuss some of the practical issues we’ve encountered in developing real machine learning systems at Netflix and some of the lessons we’ve learned over time. I will describe our approach for building machine learning systems and how it comes from a desire to balance many different, and sometimes conflicting, requirements such as handling large volumes of data, choosing and adapting good algorithms, keeping recommendations fresh and accurate, remaining responsive to user actions, and also being flexible to accommodate research and experimentation. I will focus on what it takes to put machine learning into a real system that works in a feedback loop with our users and how that imposes different requirements and a different focus than doing machine learning only within a lab environment. I will address the particular software engineering challenges that we’ve faced in running our algorithms at scale in the cloud. I will also mention some simple design patterns that we’ve fond to be useful across a wide variety of machine-learned systems.
Is that a Time Machine? Some Design Patterns for Real World Machine Learning ...Justin Basilico
Talk from ICML 2016 workshop on Machine Learning Systems about some design patterns we use at Netflix for building machine learning systems. In particular, focusing on avoiding problems that can come up with differences between offline (experimental/lab) and online (live/production) code and data.
What are the Unique Challenges and Opportunities in Systems for ML?Matei Zaharia
Presentation by Matei Zaharia at the SOSP 2019 AI Systems workshop about the systems research challenges specific to machine learning systems, including debugging and performance optimization for ML. Covers research from Stanford DAWN and an industry perspective from Databricks.
Automated machine learning (automated ML) automates feature engineering, algorithm and hyperparameter selection to find the best model for your data. The mission: Enable automated building of machine learning with the goal of accelerating, democratizing and scaling AI.
This presentation covers some recent announcements of technologies related to Automated ML, and especially for Azure. The demonstrations focus on Python with Azure ML Service and Azure Databricks.
This presentation is the fourth of four related to ML.NET and Automated ML. The presentation will be recorded with video posted to this YouTube Channel: http://bit.ly/2ZybKwI
Clipper: A Low-Latency Online Prediction Serving System: Spark Summit East ta...Spark Summit
Machine learning is being deployed in a growing number of applications which demand real-time, accurate, and robust predictions under heavy query load. However, most machine learning frameworks and systems only address model training and not deployment.
In this talk, we present Clipper, a general-purpose low-latency prediction serving system. Interposing between end-user applications and a wide range of machine learning frameworks, Clipper introduces a modular architecture to simplify model deployment across frameworks. Furthermore, by introducing caching, batching, and adaptive model selection techniques, Clipper reduces prediction latency and improves prediction throughput, accuracy, and robustness without modifying the underlying machine learning frameworks. We evaluated Clipper on four common machine learning benchmark datasets and demonstrate its ability to meet the latency, accuracy, and throughput demands of online serving applications. We also compared Clipper to the Tensorflow Serving system and demonstrate comparable prediction throughput and latency on a range of models while enabling new functionality, improved accuracy, and robustness.
Monitoring AI applications with AI
The best performing offline algorithm can lose in production. The most accurate model does not always improve business metrics. Environment misconfiguration or upstream data pipeline inconsistency can silently kill the model performance. Neither prodops, data science or engineering teams are skilled to detect, monitor and debug such types of incidents.
Was it possible for Microsoft to test Tay chatbot in advance and then monitor and adjust it continuously in production to prevent its unexpected behaviour? Real mission critical AI systems require advanced monitoring and testing ecosystem which enables continuous and reliable delivery of machine learning models and data pipelines into production. Common production incidents include:
Data drifts, new data, wrong features
Vulnerability issues, malicious users
Concept drifts
Model Degradation
Biased Training set / training issue
Performance issue
In this demo based talk we discuss a solution, tooling and architecture that allows machine learning engineer to be involved in delivery phase and take ownership over deployment and monitoring of machine learning pipelines.
It allows data scientists to safely deploy early results as end-to-end AI applications in a self serve mode without assistance from engineering and operations teams. It shifts experimentation and even training phases from offline datasets to live production and closes a feedback loop between research and production.
Technical part of the talk will cover the following topics:
Automatic Data Profiling
Anomaly Detection
Clustering of inputs and outputs of the model
A/B Testing
Service Mesh, Envoy Proxy, trafic shadowing
Stateless and stateful models
Monitoring of regression, classification and prediction models
Data Summer Conf 2018, “Monitoring AI with AI (RUS)” — Stepan Pushkarev, CTO ...Provectus
In this demo based talk we discuss a solution, tooling and architecture that allows machine learning engineer to be involved in delivery phase and take ownership over deployment and monitoring of machine learning pipelines. It allows data scientists to safely deploy early results as end-to-end AI applications in a self serve mode without assistance from engineering and operations teams. It shifts experimentation and even training phases from offline datasets to live production and closes a feedback loop between research and production.
Processing Large Datasets for ADAS Applications using Apache SparkDatabricks
Semantic segmentation is the classification of every pixel in an image/video. The segmentation partitions a digital image into multiple objects to simplify/change the representation of the image into something that is more meaningful and easier to analyze [1][2]. The technique has a wide variety of applications ranging from perception in autonomous driving scenarios to cancer cell segmentation for medical diagnosis.
Exponential growth in the datasets that require such segmentation is driven by improvements in the accuracy and quality of the sensors generating the data extending to 3D point cloud data. This growth is further compounded by exponential advances in cloud technologies enabling the storage and compute available for such applications. The need for semantically segmented datasets is a key requirement to improve the accuracy of inference engines that are built upon them.
Streamlining the accuracy and efficiency of these systems directly affects the value of the business outcome for organizations that are developing such functionalities as a part of their AI strategy.
This presentation details workflows for labeling, preprocessing, modeling, and evaluating performance/accuracy. Scientists and engineers leverage domain-specific features/tools that support the entire workflow from labeling the ground truth, handling data from a wide variety of sources/formats, developing models and finally deploying these models. Users can scale their deployments optimally on GPU-based cloud infrastructure to build accelerated training and inference pipelines while working with big datasets. These environments are optimized for engineers to develop such functionality with ease and then scale against large datasets with Spark-based clusters on the cloud.
Clipper: A Low-Latency Online Prediction Serving SystemDatabricks
Machine learning is being deployed in a growing number of applications which demand real-time, accurate, and robust predictions under heavy serving loads. However, most machine learning frameworks and systems only address model training and not deployment.
Clipper is a general-purpose model-serving system that addresses these challenges. Interposing between applications that consume predictions and the machine-learning models that produce predictions, Clipper simplifies the model deployment process by isolating models in their own containers and communicating with them over a lightweight RPC system. This architecture allows models to be deployed for serving in the same runtime environment as that used during training. Further, it provides simple mechanisms for scaling out models to meet increased throughput demands and performing fine-grained physical resource allocation for each model.
In this talk, I will provide an overview of the Clipper serving system and then discuss how to get started using Clipper to serve Spark and TensorFlow models in a production serving environment.
For the Computer Measurement Group workshop in San Diego November 2013. Also presented to a student class at UC Santa Barbara. What is Cloud Native. Capacity and Performance benchmarks. Cost Optimization Techniques - content co-developed with Jinesh Varia of AWS.
Labview1_ Computer Applications in Control_ACRRLMohammad Sabouri
Computer Applications in Control
ACRRL
Applied Control & Robotics Research Laboratory of Shiraz University
Department of Power and Control Engineering, Shiraz University, Fars, Iran.
Instructor: Dr. Asemani
TA: Mohammad Sabouri
https://sites.google.com/view/acrrl/
Microsoft has released Automated ML technologies for developers through ML.NET, Azure ML Service, and Azure Databricks. This presenter is a data scientist and Microsoft architect, and will give a comprehensive overview of the utility and use case of this automated technology for production solutions. The presentation includes code you can try now.
Deploying ML models in production, with or without CI/CD, is significantly more complicated than deploying traditional applications. That is mainly because ML models do not just consist of the code used for their training, but they also depend on the data they are trained on and on the supporting code. Monitoring ML models also adds additional complexity beyond what is usually done for traditional applications. This talk will cover these problems and best practices for solving them, with special focus on how it's done on the Databricks platform.
Presented at IDEAS SoCal on Oct 20, 2018. I discuss main approaches of deploying data science engines to production and provide sample code for the comprehensive approach of real time scoring with MLeap and Spark ML.
How to Productionize Your Machine Learning Models Using Apache Spark MLlib 2....Databricks
Apache Spark has rapidly become a key tool for data scientists to explore, understand and transform massive datasets and to build and train advanced machine learning models. The question then becomes, how do you deploy these ML model to a production environment? How do you embed what you’ve learned into customer facing data applications?
In this talk I will discuss best practices on how data scientists productionize machine learning models, do a deep dive with actual case studies, and show live tutorials of a few example architectures and code in Python, Scala, Java and SQL.
Similar to Justin Basilico, Research/ Engineering Manager at Netflix at MLconf SF - 11/13/15 (20)
Jamila Smith-Loud - Understanding Human Impact: Social and Equity Assessments...MLconf
Understanding Human Impact: Social and Equity Assessments for AI Technologies
Social and Equity Impact Assessments have broad applications but can be a useful tool to explore and mitigate for Machine Learning fairness issues and can be applied to product specific questions as a way to generate insights and learnings about users, as well as impacts on society broadly as a result of the deployment of new and emerging technologies.
In this presentation, my goal is to advocate for and highlight the need to consult community and external stakeholder engagement to develop a new knowledge base and understanding of the human and social consequences of algorithmic decision making and to introduce principles, methods and process for these types of impact assessments.
Ted Willke - The Brain’s Guide to Dealing with Context in Language UnderstandingMLconf
The Brain’s Guide to Dealing with Context in Language Understanding
Like the visual cortex, the regions of the brain involved in understanding language represent information hierarchically. But whereas the visual cortex organizes things into a spatial hierarchy, the language regions encode information into a hierarchy of timescale. This organization is key to our uniquely human ability to integrate semantic information across narratives. More and more, deep learning-based approaches to natural language understanding embrace models that incorporate contextual information at varying timescales. This has not only led to state-of-the art performance on many difficult natural language tasks, but also to breakthroughs in our understanding of brain activity.
In this talk, we will discuss the important connection between language understanding and context at different timescales. We will explore how different deep learning architectures capture timescales in language and how closely their encodings mimic the brain. Along the way, we will uncover some surprising discoveries about what depth does and doesn’t buy you in deep recurrent neural networks. And we’ll describe a new, more flexible way to think about these architectures and ease design space exploration. Finally, we’ll discuss some of the exciting applications made possible by these breakthroughs.
Justin Armstrong - Applying Computer Vision to Reduce Contamination in the Re...MLconf
Applying Computer Vision to Reduce Contamination in the Recycling Stream
With China’s recent refusal of most foreign recyclables, North American waste haulers are scrambling to figure out how to make on-shore recycling cost-effective in order to continue providing recycling services. Recyclables that were once being shipped to China for manual sorting are now primarily being redirected to landfills or incinerators. Without a solution, a nearly $5 billion annual recycling market could come to a halt.
Purity in the recycling stream is key to this effort as contaminants in the stream can increase the cost of operations, damage equipment and reduce the ability to create pure commodities suitable for creating recycled goods. This market disruption as a result of China’s new regulations, however, provides us the chance to re-examine and improve our current disposal & collection habits with modern monitoring & artificial intelligence technology.
Using images from our in-dumpster cameras, Compology has developed an ML-based process that helps identify, measure and alert for contaminants in recycling containers before they are picked-up, helping keep the recycling stream clean.
Our convolutional neural network flags potential instances of contamination inside a dumpster, enabling garbage haulers to know which containers have the wrong type of material inside. This allows them to provide targeted, timely education, and when appropriate, assess fines, to improve recycling compliance at the businesses and residences they serve, helping keep recycling services financially viable.
In this presentation, we will walk through our ML-based contamination measurement and scoring process by showing how Waste Management, a national waste hauler, has experienced 57% contamination reduction in nearly 2,000 containers over six months, This progress shows significant strides towards financially viable recycling services.
Igor Markov - Quantum Computing: a Treasure Hunt, not a Gold RushMLconf
Quantum Computing: a Treasure Hunt, not a Gold Rush
Quantum computers promise a significant step up in computational power over conventional computers, but also suffer a number of counterintuitive limitations --- both in their computational model and in leading lab implementations. In this talk, we review how quantum computers compete with conventional computers and how conventional computers try to hold their ground. Then we outline what stands in the way of successful quantum ML applications.
Josh Wills - Data Labeling as Religious ExperienceMLconf
Data Labeling as Religious Experience
One of the most common places to deploy a production machine learning systems is as a replacement for a legacy rules-based system that is having a hard time keeping up with new edge cases and requirements. I'll be walking through the process and tooling we used to help us design, train, and deploy a model to replace a set of static rules we had for handling invite spam at Slack, talk about what we learned, and discuss some problems to solve in order to make these migrations easier for everyone.
Vinay Prabhu - Project GaitNet: Ushering in the ImageNet moment for human Gai...MLconf
Project GaitNet: Ushering in the ImageNet moment for human Gait kinematics
The emergence of the upright human bipedal gait can be traced back 4 to 2.8 million years ago, to the now extinct hominin Australopithecus afarensis. Fine grained analysis of gait using the modern MEMS sensors found on all smartphones not just reveals a lot about the person’s orthopedic and neuromuscular health status, but also has enough idiosyncratic clues that it can be harnessed as a passive biometric. While there were many siloed attempts made by the machine learning community to model Bipedal Gait sensor data, these were done with small datasets oft collected in restricted academic environs. In this talk, we will introduce the ImageNet moment for human gait analysis by presenting 'Project GaitNet', the largest ever planet-sized motion sensor based human bipedal gait dataset ever curated. We’ll also present the associated state-of-the-art results in classifying humans harnessing novel deep neural architectures and the related success stories we have enjoyed in transfer-learning into disparate domains of human kinematics analysis.
Jekaterina Novikova - Machine Learning Methods in Detecting Alzheimer’s Disea...MLconf
Machine Learning Methods in Detecting Alzheimer’s Disease from Speech and Language
Alzheimer's disease affects millions of people worldwide, and it is important to predict the disease as early and as accurate as possible. In this talk, I will discuss development of novel ML models that help classifying healthy people from those who develop Alzheimer's, using short samples of human speech. As an input to the model, features of different modalities are extracted from speech audio samples and transcriptions: (1) syntactic measures, such as e.g. production rules extracted from syntactic parse trees, (2) lexical measures, such as e.g. features of lexical richness and complexity and lexical norms, and (3) acoustic measures, such as e.g. standard Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients. I will present the ML model that detects cognitive impairment by reaching agreement among modalities. The resulting model is able to achieve state of the art performance in both supervised and semi-supervised manner, using manual transcripts of human speech. Additionally, I will discuss potential limitations of any fully-automated speech-based Alzheimer's disease detection model, focusing mostly on the analysis of the impact of a not-so-accurate automatic speech recognition (ASR) on the classification performance. To illustrate this, I will present the experiments with controlled amounts of artificially generated ASR errors and explain how the deletion errors affect Alzheimer's detection performance the most, due to their impact on the features of syntactic and lexical complexity.
Meghana Ravikumar - Optimized Image Classification on the CheapMLconf
Optimized Image Classification on the Cheap
In this talk, we anchor on building an image classifier trained on the Stanford Cars dataset to evaluate two approaches to transfer learning -fine tuning and feature extraction- and the impact of hyperparameter optimization on these techniques. Once we define the most performant transfer learning technique for Stanford Cars, we will double the size of the dataset through image augmentation to boost the classifier’s performance. We will use Bayesian optimization to learn the hyperparameters associated with image transformations using the downstream image classifier’s performance as the guide. In conjunction with model performance, we will also focus on the features of these augmented images and the downstream implications for our image classifier.
To both maximize model performance on a budget and explore the impact of optimization on these methods, we apply a particularly efficient implementation of Bayesian optimization to each of these architectures in this comparison. Our goal is to draw on a rigorous set of experimental results that can help us answer the question: how can resource-constrained teams make trade-offs between efficiency and effectiveness using pre-trained models?
Noam Finkelstein - The Importance of Modeling Data CollectionMLconf
The Importance of Modeling Data Collection
Data sets used in machine learning are often collected in a systematically biased way - certain data points are more likely to be collected than others. We call this "observation bias". For example, in health care, we are more likely to see lab tests when the patient is feeling unwell than otherwise. Failing to account for observation bias can, of course, result in poor predictions on new data. By contrast, properly accounting for this bias allows us to make better use of the data we do have.
In this presentation, we discuss practical and theoretical approaches to dealing with observation bias. When the nature of the bias is known, there are simple adjustments we can make to nonparametric function estimation techniques, such as Gaussian Process models. We also discuss the scenario where the data collection model is unknown. In this case, there are steps we can take to estimate it from observed data. Finally, we demonstrate that having a small subset of data points that are known to be collected at random - that is, in an unbiased way - can vastly improve our ability to account for observation bias in the rest of the data set.
My hope is that attendees of this presentation will be aware of the perils of observation bias in their own work, and be equipped with tools to address it.
The Uncanny Valley of ML
Every so often, the conundrum of the Uncanny Valley re-emerges as advanced technologies evolve from clearly experimental products to refined accepted technologies. We have seen its effects in robotics, computer graphics, and page load times. The debate of how to handle the new technology detracts from its benefits. When machine learning is added to human decision systems a similar effect can be measured in increased response time and decreased accuracy. These systems include radiology, judicial assignments, bus schedules, housing prices, power grids and a growing variety of applications. Unfortunately, the Uncanny Valley of ML can be hard to detect in these systems and can lead to degraded system performance when ML is introduced, at great expense. Here, we'll introduce key design principles for introducing ML into human decision systems to navigate around the Uncanny Valley and avoid its pitfalls.
Sneha Rajana - Deep Learning Architectures for Semantic Relation Detection TasksMLconf
Deep Learning Architectures for Semantic Relation Detection Tasks
Recognizing and distinguishing specific semantic relations from other types of semantic relations is an essential part of language understanding systems. Identifying expressions with similar and contrasting meanings is valuable for NLP systems which go beyond recognizing semantic relatedness and require to identify specific semantic relations. In this talk, I will first present novel techniques for creating labelled datasets required for training deep learning models for classifying semantic relations between phrases. I will further present various neural network architectures that integrate morphological features into integrated path-based and distributional relation detection algorithms and demonstrate that this model outperforms state-of-the-art models in distinguishing semantic relations and is capable of efficiently handling multi-word expressions.
Anoop Deoras - Building an Incrementally Trained, Local Taste Aware, Global D...MLconf
Building an Incrementally Trained, Local Taste Aware, Global Deep Learned Recommender System Model
At Netflix, our main goal is to maximize our members’ enjoyment of the selected show by minimizing the amount of time it takes for them to find it. We try to achieve this goal by personalizing almost all the aspects of our product -- from what shows to recommend, to how to present these shows and construct their home-pages to what images to select per show, among many other things. Everything is recommendations for us and as an applied Machine Learning group, we spend our time building models for personalization that will eventually increase the joy and satisfaction of our members. In this talk we will primarily focus our attention on a) making a global deep learned recommender model that is regional tastes and popularity aware and b) adapting this model to changing taste preferences as well as dynamic catalog availability.
We will first go through some standard recommender system models that use Matrix Factorization and Topic Models and then compare and contrast them with more powerful and higher capacity deep learning based models such as sequence models that use recurrent neural networks. We will show what it entails to build a global model that is aware of regional taste preferences and catalog availability. We will show how models that are built on simple Maximum Likelihood principle fail to do that. We will then describe one solution that we have employed in order to enable the global deep learned models to focus their attention on capturing regional taste preferences and changing catalog.In the latter half of the talk, we will discuss how we do incremental learning of deep learned recommender system models. Why do we need to do that ? Everything changes with time. Users’ tastes change with time. What’s available on Netflix and what’s popular also change over time. Therefore, updating or improving recommendation systems over time is necessary to bring more joy to users. In addition to how we apply incremental learning, we will discuss some of the challenges we face involving large-scale data preparation, infrastructure setup for incremental model training as well as pipeline scheduling. The incremental training enables us to serve fresher models trained on fresher and larger amounts of data. This helps our recommender system to nicely and quickly adapt to catalog and users’ taste changes, and improve overall performance.
Vito Ostuni - The Voice: New Challenges in a Zero UI WorldMLconf
Vito Ostuni - The Voice: New Challenges in a Zero UI World
The adoption of voice-enabled devices has seen an explosive growth in the last few years and music consumption is among the most popular use cases. Music personalization and recommendation plays a major role at Pandora in providing a daily delightful listening experience for millions of users. In turn, providing the same perfectly tailored listening experience through these novel voice interfaces brings new interesting challenges and exciting opportunities. In this talk we will describe how we apply personalization and recommendation techniques in three common voice scenarios which can be defined in terms of request types: known-item, thematic, and broad open-ended. We will describe how we use deep learning slot filling techniques and query classification to interpret the user intent and identify the main concepts in the query.
We will also present the differences and challenges regarding evaluation of voice powered recommendation systems. Since pure voice interfaces do not contain visual UI elements, relevance labels need to be inferred through implicit actions such as play time, query reformulations or other types of session level information. Another difference is that while the typical recommendation task corresponds to recommending a ranked list of items, a voice play request translates into a single item play action. Thus, some considerations about closed feedback loops need to be made. In summary, improving the quality of voice interactions in music services is a relatively new challenge and many exciting opportunities for breakthroughs still remain. There are many new aspects of recommendation system interfaces to address to bring a delightful and effortless experience for voice users. We will share a few open challenges to solve for the future.
Elevating Tactical DDD Patterns Through Object CalisthenicsDorra BARTAGUIZ
After immersing yourself in the blue book and its red counterpart, attending DDD-focused conferences, and applying tactical patterns, you're left with a crucial question: How do I ensure my design is effective? Tactical patterns within Domain-Driven Design (DDD) serve as guiding principles for creating clear and manageable domain models. However, achieving success with these patterns requires additional guidance. Interestingly, we've observed that a set of constraints initially designed for training purposes remarkably aligns with effective pattern implementation, offering a more ‘mechanical’ approach. Let's explore together how Object Calisthenics can elevate the design of your tactical DDD patterns, offering concrete help for those venturing into DDD for the first time!
Encryption in Microsoft 365 - ExpertsLive Netherlands 2024Albert Hoitingh
In this session I delve into the encryption technology used in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview. Including the concepts of Customer Key and Double Key Encryption.
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
State of ICS and IoT Cyber Threat Landscape Report 2024 previewPrayukth K V
The IoT and OT threat landscape report has been prepared by the Threat Research Team at Sectrio using data from Sectrio, cyber threat intelligence farming facilities spread across over 85 cities around the world. In addition, Sectrio also runs AI-based advanced threat and payload engagement facilities that serve as sinks to attract and engage sophisticated threat actors, and newer malware including new variants and latent threats that are at an earlier stage of development.
The latest edition of the OT/ICS and IoT security Threat Landscape Report 2024 also covers:
State of global ICS asset and network exposure
Sectoral targets and attacks as well as the cost of ransom
Global APT activity, AI usage, actor and tactic profiles, and implications
Rise in volumes of AI-powered cyberattacks
Major cyber events in 2024
Malware and malicious payload trends
Cyberattack types and targets
Vulnerability exploit attempts on CVEs
Attacks on counties – USA
Expansion of bot farms – how, where, and why
In-depth analysis of the cyber threat landscape across North America, South America, Europe, APAC, and the Middle East
Why are attacks on smart factories rising?
Cyber risk predictions
Axis of attacks – Europe
Systemic attacks in the Middle East
Download the full report from here:
https://sectrio.com/resources/ot-threat-landscape-reports/sectrio-releases-ot-ics-and-iot-security-threat-landscape-report-2024/
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Accelerate your Kubernetes clusters with Varnish CachingThijs Feryn
A presentation about the usage and availability of Varnish on Kubernetes. This talk explores the capabilities of Varnish caching and shows how to use the Varnish Helm chart to deploy it to Kubernetes.
This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
Connector Corner: Automate dynamic content and events by pushing a buttonDianaGray10
Here is something new! In our next Connector Corner webinar, we will demonstrate how you can use a single workflow to:
Create a campaign using Mailchimp with merge tags/fields
Send an interactive Slack channel message (using buttons)
Have the message received by managers and peers along with a test email for review
But there’s more:
In a second workflow supporting the same use case, you’ll see:
Your campaign sent to target colleagues for approval
If the “Approve” button is clicked, a Jira/Zendesk ticket is created for the marketing design team
But—if the “Reject” button is pushed, colleagues will be alerted via Slack message
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Speakers:
Akshay Agnihotri, Product Manager
Charlie Greenberg, Host
4. 4
Netflix Scale
> 69M members
> 50 countries
> 1000 device types
> 3B hours/month
36.4% of peak US
downstream traffic
5. 5
Goal
Help members find content to watch and enjoy
to maximize member satisfaction and retention
6. 6
Everything is a Recommendation
Rows
Ranking
Over 80% of what
people watch
comes from our
recommendations
Recommendations
are driven by
Machine Learning
13. 13
System Architecture
Offline: Process data
Batch learning
Nearline: Process events
Model evaluation
Online learning
Asynchronous
Online: Process requests
Real-time
Netflix.Hermes
Netflix.Manhattan
Nearline
Computation
Models
Online
Data Service
Offline Data
Model
training
Online
Computation
Event Distribution
User Event
Queue
Algorithm
Service
UI Client
Member
Query results
Recommendations
NEARLINE
Machine
Learning
Algorithm
Machine
Learning
Algorithm
Offline
Computation Machine
Learning
Algorithm
Play, Rate,
Browse...
OFFLINE
ONLINE
More details on Netflix Techblog
14. 14
Where to place components?
Example: Matrix Factorization
Offline:
Collect sample of play data
Run batch learning algorithm like
SGD to produce factorization
Publish video factors
Nearline:
Solve user factors
Compute user-video dot products
Store scores in cache
Online:
Presentation-context filtering
Serve recommendations
Netflix.Hermes
Netflix.Manhattan
Nearline
Computation
Models
Online
Data Service
Offline Data
Model
training
Online
Computation
Event Distribution
User Event
Queue
Algorithm
Service
UI Client
Member
Query results
Recommendations
NEARLINE
Machine
Learning
Algorithm
Machine
Learning
Algorithm
Offline
Computation Machine
Learning
Algorithm
Play, Rate,
Browse...
OFFLINE
ONLINE
V
sij=uivj Aui=b
sij
X≈UVt
X
sij>t
16. 16
Three levels of Learning Distribution/Parallelization
1. For each subset of the population (e.g.
region)
Want independently trained and tuned models
2. For each combination of (hyper)parameters
Simple: Grid search
Better: Bayesian optimization using Gaussian
Processes
3. For each subset of the training data
Distribute over machines (e.g. ADMM)
Multi-core parallelism (e.g. HogWild)
Or… use GPUs
17. 17
Example: Training Neural Networks
Level 1: Machines in different
AWS regions
Level 2: Machines in same AWS
region
Spearmint or MOE for parameter
optimization
Mesos, etc. for coordination
Level 3: Highly optimized, parallel
CUDA code on GPUs
19. 19
Example development process
Idea Data
Offline
Modeling
(R, Python,
MATLAB, …)
Iterate
Implement in
production
system (Java,
C++, …)
Data
discrepancies
Missing post-
processing
logic
Performance
issues
Actual
output
Experimentation environment
Production environment
(A/B test) Code
discrepancies
Final
model
20. 20
Shared Engine
Avoid dual implementations
Experiment
code
Production
code
ProductionExperiment • Models
• Features
• Algorithms
• …
21. 21
Solution: Share and lean towards production
Developing machine learning is iterative
Need a short pipeline to rapidly try ideas
Want to see output of complete system
So make the application easy to experiment with
Share components between online, nearline, and offline
Use the real code whenever possible
Have well-defined interfaces and formats to allow you to go
off-the-beaten-path
23. 23
Make algorithms and models extensible and modular
Algorithms often need to be tailored for a
specific application
Treating an algorithm as a black box is
limiting
Better to make algorithms extensible and
modular to allow for customization
Separate models and algorithms
Many algorithms can learn the same model
(i.e. linear binary classifier)
Many algorithms can be trained on the same
types of data
Support composing algorithms
Data
Parameters
Data
Model
Parameters
Model
Algorithm
Vs.
24. 24
Provide building blocks
Don’t start from scratch
Linear algebra: Vectors, Matrices, …
Statistics: Distributions, tests, …
Models, features, metrics, ensembles, …
Loss, distance, kernel, … functions
Optimization, inference, …
Layers, activation functions, …
Initializers, stopping criteria, …
…
Domain-specific components
Build abstractions on
familiar concepts
Make the software put
them together
25. 25
Example: Tailoring Random Forests
Using Cognitive Foundry: http://github.com/algorithmfoundry/Foundry
Use a custom
tree split
Customize to
run it for an
hour
Report a
custom metric
each iteration
Inspect the
ensemble
30. 30
Machine Learning and Testing
Temptation: Use validation metrics to test software
When things work and metrics go up this seems great
When metrics don’t improve was it the
code
data
metric
idea
…?
31. 31
Reality of Testing
Machine learning code involves intricate math and logic
Rounding issues, corner cases, …
Is that a + or -? (The math or paper could be wrong.)
Solution: Unit test
Testing of metric code is especially important
Test the whole system: Just unit testing is not enough
At a minimum, compare output for unexpected changes across
versions
33. 33
Two ways to solve computational problems
Know
solution
Write code
Compile
code
Test code Deploy code
Know
relevant
data
Develop
algorithmic
approach
Train model
on data using
algorithm
Validate
model with
metrics
Deploy
model
Software Development
Machine Learning
(steps may involve Software Development)
34. 34
Take-aways for building machine learning software
Building machine learning is an iterative process
Make experimentation easy
Take a holistic view of application where you are placing
learning
Design your algorithms to be modular
Look for the easy places to parallelize first
Testing can be hard but is worthwhile
35. 35
Thank You Justin Basilico
jbasilico@netflix.com
@JustinBasilico
We’re hiring