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This year we were invited to be part of A.I. Expo Europe, held in Amsterdam. The organizers were very kind to offer us a free booth in the Startup zone of the exhibition. The event took place on 27 and 28 June 2018, and it was packed with talks and visitors. There were three tracks: A.I., IoT, and Blockchain, with the latter two dominating the exhibitors list.
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.
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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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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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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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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Emakina, one of the largest web agencies in Europe, works with internationally acclaimed brands on their branding and electronic presence. To keep their customers ahead of the curve, Emakina has recently started a series of meetups where experts in a wide range of fields come and talk about the latest developments in their field. The last meetup was held last Thursday, 8 February 2018, and with the topic: “A.I. for Commerce”, three talks were scheduled: one from Emakina, one from 904Labs, and one from Salesforce.
Tweet from the event. -
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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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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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.
