Lunch at ICAI: AI & the Service Industry in NL

This Lunch at ICAI session is focused on AI and the Service Industry in The Netherlands. Two ICAI labs share their story. Two speakers highlight their recent work at the intersection of AI and the service industry. And two leaders in the field discuss the field more broadly.

Thursday, November 26, 2020, 12-13hrs CET

12.00 (noon): Arie van Deursen (TU Delft) presents the AI for FinTech Lab
12.05: Elvan Kula on Using Machine Learning to Improve On-Time Software Delivery
12.25: Sebastian Schelter (U. Amsterdam) presents AIRLab Amsterdam
12.30: Olivier Sprangers on Parameter Efficient Deep Probabilistic Forecasting
12.50: Q&A with Arie van Deursen and Sebastian Schelter
13.00: End

Speaker: Elvan Kula, AI for FinTech Lab, TU Delft
Title: Using Machine Learning to Improve On-Time Software Delivery
Abstract: In today’s rapidly changing world, the ability to be agile as well as predictable is essential to modern software development companies. To become more predictable in software deliveries, it is essential to better understand which factors affect the on-time delivery of software. We performed a case study at ING to investigate which social and technical factors affect the on-time delivery of epics and user stories, and how they interact with each other. In our current (follow-up) study, we are integrating the newly acquired knowledge of influential factors into a deep learning model for story point estimation. We plan to evaluate this model through a large-scale trial run with development teams at the end of the year. This talk will cover the findings of both our studies on timely software delivery at ING.

Speaker: Olivier Sprangers, AIRLab Amsterdam, U. Amsterdam
Title: Parameter Efficient Deep Probabilistic Forecasting
Abstract: Probabilistic time series forecasting is crucial in many application domains such as retail, ecommerce, finance, or biology.
With the increasing availability of large volumes of data, a number of neural architectures have been proposed for this problem. In particular, Transformer-based methods achieve state-of-the-art performance on real-world benchmarks. However, these methods require a large number of parameters to be learned, which imposes high memory requirements on the computational resources for training such models.

To address this problem, we introduce a novel Bidirectional Temporal Convolutional Network (BiTCN), which requires an order of magnitude less parameters than a common Transformer-based approach.
Our model combines two Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs): the first network encodes future covariates of the time series, whereas the second network encodes past observations and covariates.
We jointly estimate the parameters of an output distribution via these two networks.

Experiments on four real-world datasets show that our method performs on par with four state-of-the-art probabilistic forecasting methods, including a Transformer-based approach and WaveNet, on two point metrics (sMAPE, NRMSE) as well as on a set of range metrics (quantile loss percentiles) in the majority of cases. Secondly, we demonstrate that our method requires significantly less parameters than Transformer-based methods, which means the model can be trained faster with significantly lower memory requirements, which as a consequence reduces the infrastructure cost for deploying these models.

*** This is an online meeting. Make sure to (1) sign up for the meetup on the meetup page and (2) ensure you receive emails from Meetup. Shortly before the event we will send you the Zoom link and password to attend, as well as the info you need to log in via a web browser (if your organization does not allow you to install Zoom). You will only receive this if you have done both these steps. ***