6 Must See Deep Learning Experts at ODSC West 2019

First imagined by Alan Turing in the 1950s, deep learning has become a core tool of data scientists with numerous applications. Recognizing the importance of deep learning to the data science community, ODSC West is proud to host world-renowned deep learning experts, such as Micheal I. Jordan from UC Berkeley and Rachel Thomas from the University of San Francisco, at our conference this year. In this article, we’ll highlight just a few of the world-class speakers leading a talk, workshop, or training at ODSC West you can’t miss.

[Related Article: ODSC West 2019 Preview: Get Started with Deep Learning (by Trying It!)]

Pieter Abbeel has held a number of roles throughout his career. He’s a professor at UC Berkeley, Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, Co-director of Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research lab (BAIR), Co-founder of covariant.ai, berkeleryopenarms.org, and Gradescope, and an Advisor at OpenAI. During the course of his career, Abbeel has pushed the frontiers of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in his effort to create ever more intelligent systems. Abbeel is also the recipient of several awards and honors, including the PECASE, NSF-CAREER, ONR-YIP, Darpa-YFA, and TR35.

Abbeel’s talk: Tutorial on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Lukas Biewald has always had a passion for solving the problems slowing the advancement of machine learning and AI. This passion led him to quit his job and found CloudFlower (now Figure Eight) in 2009 to help solve machine learning’s training data shortage problem. By 2019 Biewald had identified a new problem he wanted to tackle: insufficient software and protocols to support a new method of coding. To solve this issue, Biewald started Weights & Biases with Chris van Pelt and Shawn Lewis, which helps researchers record and visualize all aspects of their research.

Biewald’s two trainings: Hands-on Introduction to LSTMs in Keras/TensorFlow and Introduction to Deep Learning for Engineers.

Michael Tamir is the Chief ML Scientist & Head of Machine Learning/AI at SIG. Previously, he was the Head of Data Scientist at Uber Advanced Technologies Group. Tamir’s recent research has focused on utilizing machine learning to identify fake news. With machine learning and natural language processing, they trained an AI program to identify whether articles are trying to convey information or provoke an emotional response, a key indicator of fake news.

Tamir’s talk: Advanced Techniques in Natural Language Understanding with Fake News Use Cases.

Dawn Xiaodong Song, PhD, is a Professor at UC Berkeley, part of the BAIR lab, Berkeley Deep Drive, Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI and the RISE lab. She has received several awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the NSF CAREER Award to name just a few. Much of Song’s research has focused on security in computer systems and networks, particularly in the realms of software, distributed systems, applied cryptography, and blockchain. At ODSC West, Song will be giving a keynote addressing AI and security.

Rajiv Shah, PhD, is a data scientist at DataRobot. Known as the “why guy,” Shah has never stopped asking why–and he’s just gotten better tools to answer the question. These days, he uses tools in big data, predictive algorithms, and AI to utilize data and solve problems. During the course of his career, Shah has applied his skills to NBA motion data, the Chicago food prediction algorithm, and outlier detection algorithms, among others. During his presentation, Shah will be leading an interactive workshop on interpreting models and using interpretability techniques, such as feature importance and partial dependence.

Shah’s talk: Deciphering the Black Box: Latest Tools and Techniques for Interpretability.

Sacha Arnoud is a senior director of engineering at Waymo. Previously, he was a senior director of engineering at Google, where he led initiatives and worked on geo imagery. In his role at Waymo, Arnoud manages the company’s efforts in industrialized machine learning, complex scene semantics understanding, and signal processing. At ODSC West Arnoud will present on how Waymo utilizes data to increase the safety of autonomous vehicles, as well as develop new capabilities. Additionally, he will cover how the company is using machine learning to expand into new cities and geographies.

Arnoud’s talk: Building The Future: Deep-Learning for Autonomous Vehicles.

[Related Article: A Crash Course on Deep Learning in the Cloud]

For more information on the above deep learning experts and our other incredible attending speakers at ODSC West, visit odsc.com/california/. You won’t want to miss the opportunity to learn about the future of deep learning first-hand.