Jayani Withanawasam Jayani is a senior software engineer at Zaizi Asia. She is the author of "Apache Mahout Essentials” on scalable machine learning. She presented at Alfresco Summit 2014 on application of machine learning techniques in smart ECM solutions. She is currently following M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence at University of Moratuwa. In her session Jayani will share her experience on presenting a poster presentation at WiML 2015 workshop and attending NIPS 2015 conference.

1. Thoughts from
“Women in Machine Learning 2015”
Jayani Withanawasam

2. About me
● Senior Software Engineer at Zaizi R&D
● Author of the book “Apache Mahout Essentials”
● Reading for M.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence at
University of Moratuwa
● Graduated from Informatics Institute of
Technology (IIT)
● Summit speaker at Alfresco summit 2014 -
London
● Did a poster presentation on “Content Extraction
and Context Inference based Information
Retrieval” at WIML 2015 - Montreal

3. Women in Machine Learning (WiML)
● A brief history of WiML
○ Founded in 2006 by,
■ Hanna Wallach - Researcher at Microsoft Research
■ Jenn Wortman Vaughan - Senior Researcher at Microsoft
Research
● Objectives
○ Gives female research scientists, and graduate students in the machine
learning community an opportunity to meet, exchange ideas and learn
from each other.
● How I got selected
○ Submitted an abstract on machine learning related research project
○ Received travel scholarship to attend the event
○ Zaizi sponsored for conference registration and hotel accommodation

4. WiML 2015 Sponsors

5. Content Extraction and Context Inference based
Information Retrieval
● Information is embedded as different content forms under varied
contexts
● Problem: Lack of human intuition driven relevance assessment
● Novel approach to retrieve right information, regardless of the content
form or contextual discrepancies
● Use of Bag of Visual Words (BoVW) for visual content and semantic
networks
● Outcome: Set of concept and context descriptors for content
● Applications in search indexing, search ranking, recommendations,
automatic tagging and personalized search

6. My Poster Presentation

7. WiML invited talks
● Superhuman Multitasking - Raia Hadsell, Google
DeepMind
■ Games as a platform to implement and test AI
applications. E.g., Atari 2600
■ Deep Q Learning (Reinforcement Learning) with
model distillation
● Is it all in the Phrasing?
Lillian Lee, Cornell University
○ Does phrasing affects memorability?

8. WiML invited talks (Continued…)
● Interactive and Interpretable Machine Learning
Models for Human Machine Collaboration - Been
Kim, AI2/University of Washington
○ Bayes Case Model (BCM)
○ Prototypes and subspaces
● Structured Data - Corinna Cortes, Google Research
○ Structured snippets using good tables

9. Events I attended
● Facebook Lean In circle
● NVidia deep learning tutorial
○ Demo on DIGITS
● Poster presentations - http://wiml2015.weebly.com/list-of-poster-
presenters.html
● Career/advice session
○ Long-term Career Planning - Lizi Ottens, Apple
○ Work/Life Balance - Amy Greenwald, Brown University
○ Life with Kids - Raia Hadsell, Google DeepMind, Joelle Pineau,
McGill
http://wiml2015.weebly.com/list-of-careeradvice-tables.html

10. Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS)
● Considered as one of the top conference in Machine
Learning
● Some stats:
○ 6 invited talks
○ 403 accepted papers (total of 1838 submissions)
● Highlights
○ Deep Learning
■ Use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in
Computer Vision
■ Use of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) in Natural
Language Processing (NLP)
● LSTMs (Long Short Term Memory Networks)

11. Q & A

12. Thank you