Machine Learning @ Square

After a month hiatus, we're back with Rong Yan presenting "Machine Learning @ Square."

Abstract

Square have been rethinking buying and selling ever since the company is founded in 2009. From our iconic card reader to a free cash app and an online marketplace, we’re building tools to help great businesses be more successful and to make shopping delightful. Machine learning applications such as fraud detection and recommendation have played a key role in helping us achieving our missions. In this talk I will give a high-level overview about data applications in Square, followed by a deep dive on how machine learning is used in our industrial leading fraud detection models.

Bio

Dr. Rong Yan is currently the Director of Data Science and Infrastructure in Square Inc. He was a engineering manager for the Ads Relevance & Quality team in Facebook from 2009 to 2013, responsible for optimizing delivery performance for all Facebook ad products, and a Research Staff Member in the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center from 2006 to 2009. Dr. Yan received his M.Sc. (2004) and Ph.D. (2006) degree from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. His research interests include large-scale machine learning, data mining, social media, multimedia information retrieval and computer vision. More information about Dr. Rong Yan can be found at his homepage, http://yanrong.info (http://yanrong.info/).

Dr. Yan received the Best Paper runner-Up awards in ACM Multimedia 2004 and ACM CIVR 2007. He has received the IBM Research External Recognition Award in 2007. He led the technical efforts for building the face detection service in Facebook, and also designed the automatic video retrieval system that achieves the best performance in the world-wide TRECVID evaluation in 2003 / 2005. Dr. Yan has authored or co-authored 5 book chapters and more than 60 international conference and journal papers. Dr. Yan has served or is serving as co-chairs for 10 conferences / workshops and as a Program Committee member in more than 40 ACM / IEEE conferences. He is an expert reviewer for more than 10 international journals. He has served in the NSF proposal review panel and as reviewers for several other research councils. Dr. Yan gives tutorials and guest lectures at several major conferences and universities.