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Figure 1. At the stage of AI2Future.
AI2Future is a local, Croatian, initiative for disseminating the importance and for grounding the use of Artificial Intelligence. The conference brings together researchers, A.I. start ups, and large corporates from all around Croatia to share experiences and learn from each other on what A.I. can and cannot do.
I was invited to give one of the two keynote talks. The first keynote focused on conversational agents and natural language processing and mine followed up with insights how search powers a large spectrum of applications from search, question and answering, and recommendations. I focused on the work we do at 904Labs and illustrated the principles of online learning to rank through real-world examples from our experimences with our customers.
I got many questions after the talk which is a sign that the audience understood the topic and was intrigued by what A.I. can do for search. Some of the questions were brought to the following breaks with some of them leading to follow up meetings in the next days.
I much enjoyed the conference, and I hope that the organizers will follow up with another version next year. I believe that we do need more of this type of initiative to disseminate what A.I. is and A.I. can and cannot do so that organizations shape a better picture of how they can use it to solve challenges that they face.
Related Posts
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In my talk I touched upon a bunch of challenges we’ve faced at 904Labs and how we came about to solving them. Open questions revolve around online learning to rank algorithms, delayed feedback, design of new metrics to avoid embarassing results, and the importance of investing in an evaluation platform. At 904Labs we have come a long way and we have working answers for these questions, however, as these questions are particularly difficult to answer, I’ve invited people to drop me a note with ideas, if they are interested. I’ve already got some nice feedback, and I hope to see more research on these areas in the near future!
Below are some tweets from my talk.
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On 31 May, I was invited to give a talk at TECH Talks in Amsterdam. TECH Talks is a new meetup organized by Techloop.io, a new way for matching jobs and talent in IT. My talk revolved on how we built an e-commerce focused search engine using machine learning (or as most people know it, A.I.). The meetup had a great start with more than 200 registered people and more than 100 people showed up; the room at TQ was at its maximum capacity! The audience was diverse with a nice mix of frontend, backend , senior and junior engineers, and also people from other disciplines who are interested in keeping up with latest developments in IT and e-commerce. Techloop and TQ were great organizers providing a great atmosphere (pizza and beer, included) facilitating great chats and networks afterwards.
You can see the video of the talks here (mine is the first after the introduction by Techloop):
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Recording of the talk is on YouTube; courtesy of Frankfurt Data Science. I was happy to be invited at Frankfurt Data Science meetup to talk about data science, meetups, and how to build a data science-oriented startup. The event was held at Frankfurt School on March 1st, 2018. In my talk I gave an overview of the meetup scene in Amsterdam, briefly presented Amsterdam Data Science and its activites, and then I shared my experiences on founding and developing 904Labs, before I delved into one of my favorite topics: machine learning and search.
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This year I talked at the industry track where I shared my experiences from running a search startup in the Netherlands. I received positive feedback, and it was good to catch up with old friends and meet new people. If you want a short recap from the latest and greatest trends in search technology, read on my summary on 904Labs blog.
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I was happy to be invited at the Amsterdam City A.I. Event on December 11, 2017. My talk revolved around our experiences at 904Labs in building an A.I. focused company. It was fun to be among A.I. enthusiasts and to see that people identified with our experiences–which means that we are on good track!
The talk is online on YouTube (clicking the link will start playing the video at the start of my talk):
Recording of the talk on YouTube. Below are some tweets from the event:
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I moved to Barcelona in the first week of September for a three-month internship at Yahoo! Research Labs. I’m very excited about it, and I’m looking forward to getting to know the people here and the problems they are working on.
Update: My work at Yahoo! Research Labs resulted in a publication at SIGIR 2012 [1]; see [post] for the abstract(20120623-sigir2012-language-intent-models.md).
References
[1] Manos Tsagkias and Roi Blanco. 2012. Language intent models for inferring user browsing behavior. In Proceedings of the 35th international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval (SIGIR ‘12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 335–344. ACM Link. PDF
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It was an intense two days, with lots of people dropping by 904Labs’ booth and asking about what we do and how 904Labs search technology can help them in their settings. Altough the average visitor profile was not looking for onsite search, we had good chats with a bunch of Dutch and international and small, medium, and big companies on how onsite search can help their endeavors. We talked on how search technology is underneath many applications, including chatbots, and self-service applications. No matter the application, good search can help increase revenue in the setting of selling products, or reduce costs in the setting of self-service as visitors are better able to find the information they’re looking for without calling the company’s call centre.