Category Archives: Meetings

Posts about our meetings

MLGdansk #140 – Building & Managing High Performance Analytics Teams

We would like to invite you to 140. MLGdańsk meeting on Monday, 22nd May 2023 at 18.00 CEST (UTC+2)

The meeting will be held online on jitsi: https://meet.jit.si/MLGdansk_nb141_building_analytics_teams

Our guest speaker will be:
John K. Thompson
Global Head, Artificial Intelligence (AI), EY
https://lnkd.in/dPN5yv6H

The topic of the meeting is:
Building & Managing High Performance Analytics Teams

About speaker:
“John is an experienced technology executive with over 35 years of expertise in the fields of data, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence. He is currently the Global Head of AI at EY and has been responsible for the global advanced analytics and AI function at a leading biopharmaceutical company. He was also an Executive Partner at Gartner and was responsible for the advanced analytics business unit of the Dell Software Group.

John is a prolific author and has written several books, including “Building Analytics Teams,” “Analytics: How to win with Intelligence,” and his latest book, “Data for All,” which is a Revolutionary Manifesto for Data. The book instructs people on how to protect and manage their data and the data of their loved ones.

Mr Thompson’s technology expertise includes all aspects of advanced analytics and information management, including descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics, artificial intelligence, big data, simulation, optimization, and high-performance computing. He has built start-up organizations and reengineered business units of Fortune 500 firms to reach their potential.

John has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Ferris State University and an MBA in Marketing from DePaul University. He is a technology leader with expertise and experience spanning all operational areas with a focus on strategy, product innovation, growth, and efficient execution. One of his primary areas of focus and interest has been to create innovative technologies to increase the value derived by organizations around the world.

Abstract of the talk:
“Over the past decade, the speed at which data and analytics has been reshaping our lives is accelerating. Now, it is even more important for enterprises to build and implement analytics in an intelligent manner.

One of the key ingredients to the success of data and analytics efforts is the team driving and informing the analytics process and resulting transformational change. A salient question that has been asked is – how does an enterprise build an effective analytics team?

In this session, we will walk through the process of succeeding in the analytics journey. We will examine the best approach to building a corporate analytics function and a high performing analytics team. We will describe and discuss the Artisanal and Modular approaches to hiring and building a team.

We will also examine how to evolve from the Artisanal and/or Modular model to a Hybrid model. We will examine how to manage a high performing analytics team to deliver analytical models and applications that are implemented and used in daily operations to improve organizational efficiency and effectiveness.

Be ready to ask questions, this will be an interactive and open discussion.”

The meeting is open to all interested – feel free to join!

MLGdańsk #139 – DCID: Deep Canonical Information Decomposition

We would like to invite you to 139. MLGdańsk meeting on Monday, 17th April 2023 at 18.00 CET

The meeting will be held online on jitsi: https://meet.jit.si/MLGdansk_20032023_nb139

Our guests speaker is:
Alexander Rakowski
Hasso Plattner Institute, Poczdam
https://hpi.de/research-schools/hpi-dse/mitglieder/research-pages/alexander-rakowski.html

The topic of the meeting is:
DCID: Deep Canonical Information Decomposition

Abstract:
“We consider the problem of separating the signal shared between two scalar variables, from their individual signals. In the case of non-scalar, multivariate variables, the probabilistic interpretation of CCA allows to retrieve the shared signal. However, in the univariate case, CCA can only yield trivial solutions. Inspired by the field of Deep Multi-Task Learning, we propose to overcome this problem by approximating the variables of interest with Deep Neural Network classifiers and using their latent features as multivariate decompositions of the variables, allowing us to utilize the standard CCA machinery to discover the shared signal.

The meeting is open to all interested – feel free to join!

MLGdańsk #137 – Overview of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

We would like to invite you to 135. MLGdańsk meeting on Monday, 6th March 2023 at 18.00 CET

The meeting will be held online on jitsi::
https://meet.jit.si/MLGdansk_06032023_nb137

Our guests speaker is:
Nikita Pavlichenko
Toloka.AI

The topic of the meeting is:
“Overview of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Nikita Pavlichenko is a Research Scientist at Toloka, where he works on connecting deep learning models with the crowdsourcing and human evaluation of generative models.

Abstract:
Recent progress on Large Language Models introduced a new machine learning technique: reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). RLHF powers models such as InstructGPT and ChatGPT.

In this talk, we are going to provide an introduction to why this technique is necessary, the basics of reinforcement learning, why RL needs human feedback, and how to solve practical tasks with RLHF.

The meeting is open to all interested – feel free to join!

MLGdańsk #135 – Transforming Enterprise Data Science with Transformers

We would like to invite you to 135. MLGdańsk meeting on Monday, 6th February 2023 at 18.00 CEST

The meeting will be held online on jitsi:
https://meet.jit.si/MLGdansk_06022023_nb135

Our guests speakers are:
Rajiv Shah
Andrew Jardin
HuggingFace

The topic of the meeting is:
“Transforming Enterprise Data Science with Transformers

Rajiv Shah is a leading expert on practical AI. At Hugging Face, his primary focus is on enabling enterprises to succeed with AI. He previously led data science enablement efforts across hundreds of data scientists at DataRobot and has been part of data science teams at Snorkel AI, Caterpillar, and State Farm.
He is a widely recognized speaker on AI, has received many patents, and published research papers in several domains, including sports analytics, deep learning, and interpretability. He received a Ph.D. and a J.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Andrew is an Account Executive at Hugging Face where he helps enterprise customers understand how to leverage the 🤗 open-source resources to build state of the art ML. Outside of Hugging Face Andrew is the Toronto chapter lead for MLOps.Community and has a background in NLP, MLOps and engineering.

Abstract:
“Large-scale models drive the most innovative and exciting AI technologies like Alexa, Dalle, and Github’s Copilot.
Rajiv shares how large-scale models are reshaping analytics and how enterprises are unlocking value in new use cases, such as auto-completion, semantic search, and document AI.
The talk will include code snippets for getting started and addressing societal concerns with these models.”

The meeting is open to all interested – feel free to join!

MLGdańsk #132 – How to transform a notebook model into a system pipeline

MLGdańsk online meeting will be held on Monday, 2022.10.03, at 18:00 CEST.

link to the meeting: https://meet.jit.si/MLGdansk_03102022_nb132

Our speaker will be:
Francisco Pinto-Santos, MSc
➡️ https://www.linkedin.com/in/franpintosantos/
➡️ https://github.com/GandalFran
➡️ https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=oX-eoqoAAAAJ&hl=es

The topic of the talk is:
How to transform a notebook model into a system pipeline

Abstract:
“In the world of data analysis, there is a lot of information on the Internet about building models of various kinds to solve all kinds of problems. However, when a complex model is developed, it is necessary to implement it in a software system.

In this step, most of the people dedicated to data science, need the help of software architects and engineers, MLOps, etc. Therefore, in this workshop, we intend to show the first steps to identify how to segment a model in processing stages, and implement a distributed pipeline, managed by basic continuous integration techniques, allowing the creation and maintenance of a comprehensive system that serves the model.

To do so, we will first introduce the concept of microservice architectures and event-driven architectures, and then explain what an event broker is and start working with a real one, Apache Kafka.

Once the work base is established, we will teach how to create microservices in Python integrated with Apache Kafka, with a model (or part of it) integrated in these, as well as the necessary scripts for the continuous integration of these.

Finally, we will explain the possibilities offered when integrating ingest, storage, etc. so that attendees can expand their knowledge in this area later.”

The meeting is open to all interested – feel free to join!

MLGdańsk #131 – Legal Document Summarization and AI Explainability

MLGdańsk online meeting will be held on Monday, 2022.09.19, at 18:00 CEST.

link to the meeting: https://meet.jit.si/MLGdansk_19092022_nb131

Our speaker:
Claudia Schulz, PhD
Thomson Reuters Labs
https://www.linkedin.com/in/claudia-schulz-phd/

The topic of the talk is:
Legal Document Summarization and AI Explainability

Abstract:
“Legal research is a highly manual and time-consuming process. Legal professionals, for example, have to read court cases that are up to 100 pages long, just to identify the most important aspects in order to decide whether their firm should represent the case.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques like information extraction and summarisation thus provide great opportunities to save law firms time. However, applying NLP to legal documents is highly challenging due to the domain-specific terminology and variability in the legal document layout.

In this talk, we show how Thomson Reuters Labs tackles these challenges and present our work on summarising court cases and providing human-understandable explanations thereof.”

The meeting is open to all interested – feel free to join!

 
 
 
 

PS: More information about Thomson Reuters Labs and current job openings: https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/artificial-intelligence/join-thomson-reuters-labs.html

MLGdańsk #130 – AI Governance, Standards and Regulation for a Trustworthy AI ecosystem

MLGdańsk online meeting will be held on Monday, 2022.09.05, at 18:00 CEST.

link to the meeting: https://meet.jit.si/MLGdansk_05092022_nb130

Our speaker:
Dr. Ansgar Koene
Global AI Ethics and Regulatory Leader at EY
https://www.linkedin.com/in/akoene/

The topic of the talk is:
AI Governance, Standards and Regulation for a Trustworthy AI ecosystem

Abstract:
“The increasing use of algorithmic decision-making technologies (colloquially referred to as “AI”) in industry, commerce and public service provision are giving rise to concerns about potential negative impacts on individuals (e.g. algorithmic discrimination bias) and the wider socio-economic fabric of society (e.g. displacement of jobs).

With trust in the technology being cited as a key barrier for successful deployment, both in the public and private sector, there is a growing push toward translating AI ethics principles into actionable practice.

This talk will review current initiatives towards the development of AI governance frameworks, ethics and oversight related standards and regulations, and discuss the role each of these can play within a wider ecosystem of trustworthiness for the use of AI.”

The meeting is open to all interested – feel free to join!

MLGdańsk #125 – AI for autonomy of blind and visually impaired people

MLGdańsk online meeting will be held on Monday, 2022.05.09, at 18:00 CET.

link to the meeting: https://meet.jit.si/MLGdansk_09052022_nb125

The topic of his talk is:
AI for autonomy of blind and visually impaired people

Our speakers:
Artur Godlewski, Jarosław Mąka, Monika Falk, dr Wojciech Figiel, Agnieszka Mikołajczyk

They represent Zatoichi company https://zatoichi.pl/

Few words about presentation:
“We would like to talk about our development of an application for blind that will read expiration dates from food packages.

Moreover we will talk about how it is connected with the autonomy of blind and visually impaired people.”

Our meetings are open for all interested – feel free to join!

MLGdańsk #121 – Predicting the Unpredictable: Mathematical Models and the Covid 19 Pandemic

MLGdańsk online meeting be take place on Monday, 2022.03.07, at 18:00 CET

link to meeting: https://meet.jit.si/MLGdansk_07032022_nb121

Our speaker will be prof. Tyll Krüger
https://scholar.google.pl/citations?user=4_ads5kAAAAJ&hl=en

The topic of his talk is:
Predicting the Unpredictable: Mathematical Models and the Covid 19 Pandemic

Abstract of the presentation:
“Predicting the future of the COVID-19 pandemic is a challenging task and can not be done without mathematical models describing the progression of the epidemic.

Despite large uncertainties about epidemiological relevant medical and social key parameters, mathematical models can provide deep insights into the dependency of the epidemic dynamics on those parameters.

Epidemiological models can furthermore be used to develop and improve rational strategies for controlling the COVID-19 epidemics.

We focus in the talk on fundamental mathematical features of individual based epidemic models and highlight the close relation to problems in percolation and random graph theory.

We emphasize the special role of households and discuss some results and conjectures in first passage percolation and their impact on epidemic processes.

Finally we present some outcomes of the MOCOS microsimulation model for the COVID -19 epidemic in Poland and Germany and reflect on problems related to model based policy advice for epidemic control.”

Serdecznie zapraszamy!

44th meeting – introduction to RNNs

Meeting was held on 25.06.2018.

The meeting had a form of mini-course focused on Recurrent Neural Networks. The presenter was Karol Draszawka

Karol’s description of course:

“This course presents the basics of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) in the context of sequence labelling problems. The need for RNNs is shown first. After that, basic RNNs architecture and the training algorithm Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) are given in theory and implemented using Tensorflow primitives. Considatations about problems with such basic RNNs leads to the design of refined RNN architectures, such as LSTM and GRU, which are next implemented, also from Tensorflow primitives. Lastly, some examples and tips for using RNNs for real problems are given.”

Our next meeting is on 9th July 2018. All ML Enthusiasts are welcome to join us!

Machine Learning Hackathon in Gdańsk

ML Gdańsk together with HACKER:SPACE Trójmiasto has organized Machine Learning Hackathon in Gdańsk. This event has been sponsored by PredictX. It was very energetic and collaborative meeting:
  • 2 coaches,
  • 20 attendees,
  • 2 different problems (classification & regression),
  • 6 hours of collaboration and networking.
All attendees has decided on classification problem:
Hackathon summary on Piotr W. blog (in Polish):
Information on the event’s sponsor:
  • PredictX delivers big data, machine learning, and decision automation services to data-reliant industries, in particular financial services, procurement, retail, travel and healthcare. Using embedded intelligence and data visualisation technology, PredictX continuously drive cost savings, operational efficiencies and revenue growth. PredictX supports clients in capturing, cleaning and compiling their data from multiple sources from within and outside the business. More: https://www.predictx.com/

40½ Meeting – The Deep Learning Revolution: From Technology to Impact

10 May (Thursday) – special meeting, due to the special guest – Chris Rowen – who visited Gdańsk and presented passionate talk about the machine learning revolution, accelerating startups, and especially about his new startup – BabbleLabs.

Chris is a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur and technologist, now serving as co-founder and CEO of BabbleLabs. He has led Cognite Ventures, a specialized analysis, investment and advisory company for deep learning start-ups. He has served as CTO for Cadence’s IP Group, where he and his team develop new processor and memory for advanced applications in mobile, automotive, infrastructure, deep learning and IoT systems. Chris joined Cadence after its acquisition of Tensilica, the company he founded to develop extensible processors. He led Tensilica as CEO and later, CTO, to become one of the most prolific embedded processor architectures.

Before founding Tensilica in 1997, he was VP and GM of the Design Reuse Group at Synopsys. Chris also was a pioneer in developing RISC architecture and helped found MIPS Computer Systems, where he was VP of Microprocessor Development. He holds an MSEE and PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford and a BA in physics from Harvard. He holds more than 40 US and international patents. He was named an IEEE Fellow in 2015 for his work in development of microprocessor technology.