An Evening with Machine Learning Experts

Hi Makers!,

Thank you for submitting great entries to the call for papers! Following is a brief agenda for the evening:

6:30 - 6:45 PM - Doors open and pizza
6:50 pm - 7:30 pm - Best practices for building scalable Recommendation Systems by Vedant Dhandhania
7:30 pm - 7:50 pm - Introduction to building FAQ Chatbot by Bowen Chen
7:50 - 8:30: Predictive Modeling of Lapse Rates in Financial Services by Olaf and Tommy
8:30 pm - 9:00 pm - Networking
9 pm - Enjoy Venice Beach; hard stop

1. Topic: Best practices for building scalable Recommendation Systems

Vedant Dhandhania, ReSci: Vedant has been focused on building large scale recommendation systems for over 200 businesses. His passion lies between the intersection of Signal Processing and Machine learning.

Earlier, Vedant used to lead the Data science efforts at Retention Science where his team build out over 30 predictive ML models for more than 300M users. The ML models include recommenders, lead scoring, churn prediction, LTV/CLV, AB testing, Bandits, Reinforcement learning for marketing applications
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vedantdhandhania/

2. Topic: Introduction FAQ Chatbot (NLP)

Bowen Chen, Fair.com: I would like to give a short talk about building a FAQ chatbot to discuss the reasons why data scientists need to think, act and build like engineers. In the talk, I planned to share a quick tutorial on how to leverage the power of existing AI platforms to build a useful solution that drives value with very little code written, in turn proving organizations do not need to build everything from scratch to make an impact.

3. Topic - Predictive Modeling of Lapse Rates in Financial Services: Statistical and Machine Learning approaches in theory and practice

A. Tommy Steed: Director Of Analytics, Pacific Life https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommy-steed-fsa-04951541/
B. Olaf Menzer: Sr. Data Scientist, Pacific Life https://www.linkedin.com/in/olaf-menzer-00871184/

Other details:
The format for the evening:
We are trying to organize an evening with ML experts from different genres. So, that the audience could enjoy learning and sharing different ideas.

Location:
1314 Pacific Ave, Venice, CA 90291
Directions:
Enter the building through the back (alley) entrance via Park Row Alley. You can enter the event space through the two middle doors of the building.