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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.
It was a packed room, with more than 200 registered people for the event, and the talk was broadcasted live on YouTube. There will soon be a video, which I will share here. The audience was from diverse backgrounds, and I enjoyed the interactions very much. I was happily surprised by the professional organization of the event, and the ambition for making Frankfurt one of the leading centres in data science in Europe. All the best to the organizers and I hope to see more collaboration on data science between Frankfurt and Amsterdam in the near future!
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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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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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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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Besides core business, it was nice to see other startups and non-startups from Amsterdam and catch up with old faces and meet new ones. Overall, it was a fun experience. A big thanks to the A.I. Expo Europe organizers for inviting us over!
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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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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.
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The Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop was held this year in Delft. A nice lot of people from all around the Netherlands, Belgium, and a handful from abroad came together to share their research highlights from this year. It was a nice programme, filled with interesting short talks (about 15mins) that were great to give us a summary of what everybody is working on.
My personal highlight was Chato’s keynote speech on algorithmic bias. Although a lot is discussed on the topic, there is yet no to little work that presents some sort of foundation that describes the issue, frames it and offers some theoretical framework from which we can start thinking about solutions. Chato’s work laid the ground works on this area. He started with explaining what algorithmic bias is and stressed how coupled it is with data collection. I’m looking forward to seeing more on his work on the subject.