Making boats fly at the America’s Cup with Deep Reinforcement Learning

In this meetup, members of QuantumBlack, the advanced data analytics arm of McKinsey and Company, will share how the team helped Emirates Team New Zealand defend and win the oldest trophy in international sport, the America’s Cup.

Nic Hohn and George Mathews will share how the application of Deep Reinforcement Learning revolutionised not just the boat design process for Emirates Team New Zealand’s campaign, but helped inspire new techniques and tactics among the sailing team.

The event will be fully catered thanks to our generous sponsors, Fuel50 and StatsLab. Vegan, df & gluten free options will be available.

The event may be filmed and the recording may be made publicly available. Our meetups are inclusive and harassment is not tolerated. For more information, see our Code of Conduct: https://www.meetup.com/Auckland-AI-Meetup/messages/boards/thread/50720238

Sponsors:

Fuel50 - YOUR FUTURE, OUR PASSION
https://www.fuel50.com/

StatsLab - Get fast answers to critical business questions
https://www.statslab-bi.co.nz/

=== SPEAKERS ===

Dr Nicolas Hohn

Nicolas is a Data Science Senior Expert with McKinsey and Company. He is also the Chief Data Scientist for QuantumBlack Australia, the advanced analytics arm of McKinsey, and leads the analytics team. He brings more than 15 years of post PhD experience in research, development and commercialization of product innovation in big data analytics and predictive modeling. He has led analytics teams to extract actionable insights from data in a range of fields including Financial Services, Telecommunication, Retail, Mining, Manufacturing and IoT. He has experience in building end-to-end data driven analytics solutions using streaming architectures and distributed machine learning.

Dr George Mathews

George Mathews is a Principal Data Scientist at QuantumBlack and McKinsey & Company. He has significant expertise in Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Bayesian Statistics, and Optimisation & Control Theory. At QuantumBlack he leads Data Science teams solving challenging real world problems across: mining and mineral processing, oil and gas, banking, telecommunications, retail, and others.

Depending on logistics, one or more of the speakers may need to attend virtually, but will still be presenting live and taking Q&A.