PyBerlin 49 - 🍃🍃October event 🍃🍃

Agenda:
• 18:30 - Opening doors of the venue

• 19:00 - Welcome to PyBerlin! // Organisers

• 19:10 - Welcome from the host - HeyJobs Gmbh

• 19:20 - Applied NLP with LLMs: Beyond black-box monoliths // Ines Montani
Large Language Models (LLMs) have enormous potential, but also challenge existing workflows in industry that require modularity, transparency and data privacy. In this talk, I'll show some practical solutions for using the latest state-of-the-art models in real-world applications and distilling their knowledge into smaller and faster components that you can run and maintain in-house.

Speaker's bio:
Ines Montani is a developer specializing in tools for AI and NLP technology. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Explosion and a core developer of spaCy, a popular open-source library for Natural Language Processing in Python, and Prodigy, a modern annotation tool for creating training data for machine learning models.

• 19:50 - Short break

• 20:20 - MLOps at HeyJobs: Building a Continuous Training Pipeline for Our Custom Embeddings Model // Viktor Bubanja and Shantanu Ladhwe
As user behaviour and the relationship between users and jobs evolve over time, it’s crucial that our embeddings models powering Recommendations and Search capture these changes. In this talk, we’ll explore how we use AWS SageMaker to train and dynamically update embedding models to reflect the latest user-job relationships. We’ll dive into the MLOps challenges of handling model versioning, backfilling job embeddings, and managing rollbacks, sharing insights from our approach to keeping our Matching services up-to-date.

Viktor Bubanja speaker's bio:
Viktor is a Senior Software Engineer in the Matching team at HeyJobs, where he is helping build the search and recommendations systems connecting talent with ideal job opportunities. His focus is on deploying ML systems into production and ensuring their scalability and reliability.

Shantanu Ladhwe speaker's bio:
Shantanu is ML Engineering Manager at HeyJobs, where he works with a talented team of ML and Software Engineers to develop machine learning-driven search and recommendation systems for the job platform and has over 8 years of experience in Data Science, Machine Learning, MLOps, and NLP - now LMMs ;)

• 20:50 - Building Blinkist's Personalized Real-Time Recommendation Feed: From Design to Implementation // Idil Ismiguzel
In this talk, I'll take you behind the scenes of how we revamped Blinkist's homepage with a real-time, personalized feed. I'll share how our system leverages multiple recommender algorithms and a ranking model (aka brain) to serve tailored content that boosts user engagement and retention. We’ll dive into how we utilize AWS Sagemaker to train these models and host models as endpoints, making real-time recommendations accessible for multiple services. From design to deployment, we will cover full journey of delivering impactful user experiences through smart personalization.

Speaker's bio:
Idil is a Data Scientist and Machine Learning Engineer at Blinkist+Go1, where she helps drive personalized content and learning experiences. With a background in mobile gaming and tourism, she brings a diverse range of industry experience to her work. In addition to her work in ed-tech, Idil is a contributor to Towards Data Science on Medium, where she writes about machine learning, AI, and data science trends.

• 21:20 - Closing session // Organisers

This event will be only in-person. Please check our Code of Conduct and official health regulation in Berlin before coming. If you feel some signs of sickness, please consider skipping this event and attending another time. We will have plenty of events in different formats in the future.
Looking forward seeing you all soon!