FlowerChecker: Exciting journey of one ML startup - Ondra Veselý & Jiří Řihák

FlowerChecker: Exciting journey of one ML startup - Ondra Veselý & Jiří Řihák (the meetup will be held in Czech)

Abstract:
FlowerChecker -- machine learning startup -- was established three years ago by three PhD. students with one goal: plant identification.
The story-like talk shows how we use machine learning to validate the initial business idea. How we struggled trying to use existing image-recognition software and also and how and why we have collected dataset for the first commercial machine learning system with different interfaces: mobile app, facebook chatbot or twitter guerrilla marketing bot. Many colorful graphs included.
The second part of the talk goes more technical: TensorFlow, Inception v3, data preprocessing tricks, performance tuning and debugging. Basically all the struggles we needed to overcome to be able to identify 9000 different plant species in order to build reliable plant.id service (https://plant.id/).

Language: Czech

Speakers:
Ondřej is a developer and data engineer. After a brief experience with development for Seznam.cz and AVG Technologies, he founded FlowerChecker where he plays CEO role. After stabilising the business, he joined Kiwi.com on its early startup-stage to establish analytics, research teams. Currently he builds streaming pipelines for business intelligence, leads Czechitas python courses and consults R&D projects for the European Commission.

Jirka is FlowerChecker co-founder responsible for app development and ML in plant identification. He is also finishing his PhD in Adaptive Learning group - small, but enthusiastic research lab at FI MU focused on application of ML in education.

Language: Czech

Program:
- Talk
- Discussion
- Networking (Bitcoin Coffee)

Machine Learning Meetups (MLMU) is an independent platform for people interested in Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, Pattern Recognition, Data Journalism, Artificial Intelligence, Agent Systems and all the related topics. MLMU is a regular community meeting usually consisting of a talk, a discussion and a subsequent networking. At the end of the year 2016, MLMU spread also to Brno and Bratislava.