Building Recommender Systems: A Case Study with Open Source Software

The June meetup will include three (3) things we find very compelling, and we hope our community agrees:

1. A great topic - Artificial Intelligence and data.

2. A case study - Case studies allow the speaker to "pop the hood" and allows attendees to walk away with applicable, real-world knowledge.

3. A knowledgeable and experienced speaker - Serdar Kadioglu is the Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Fidelity Investments and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Computer Science at Brown University.

Topic:
Building Recommender Systems: A Case Study with Open Source Software

Abstract:
In this talk, we demonstrate a case study on building a Recommender System using open-source software built as part of the AI Center of Excellence at Fidelity Investments. We focus on fundamental components from feature engineering and selection to model training and testing.

In particular, we show how to generate features from structured and unstructured data via TextWiser and Seq2Pat, how to conduct feature selection via Selective, how to build Bandit-based recommendation algorithms via MABWiser, and finally, how to evaluate performance with respect to recommendation and fairness metrics via Jurity.

This overview can serve as a starting point for software developers and data science practitioners in their efforts in building similar systems.

Speaker:
Serdar Kadioglu, VP of AI, Fidelity Investments

Bio:
Serdar Kadioglu is the Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Fidelity Investments and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Computer Science at Brown University. Previously, he led the Advanced Constraint Technology R&D team at Oracle and worked at Adobe. Dr. Kadioglu's algorithmic research is at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Discrete Optimization with practical interests in building robust and scalable products while also contributing to the open-source ecosystem.

Serdar on the internets:
https://twitter.com/serdar_kadioglu
https://skadio.github.io/

Joining Details:
This is a virtual meetup using Zoom. It is 100% free, as always, but registration is required.

Registration link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_oZ14e3kRTMmXdIsBUdHcgw

Schedule:
We'll start the Zoom webinar at approximately 11:30 am ET to allow for speaker onboarding and general pre-talk prep. Official programming will begin at 12 noon ET sharp. Attendees can join the session anytime after 11:30 am ET. We plan to wrap things up and finish the meetup no later than 1:00 pm ET.

Giveaways:
We'll give away a number of nice items, as always. At least one piece of technology will be included (Chromebook, mechanical keyboards have been given away in the past), as well as ATO shirts, hats, etc.

Questions:
Anyone with questions can contact us directly at info@allthingsopen.org