Machine Learning on Mobile Devices

Our presenter for the evening is Dr. Miriam Friedel, Head of Data Science at Skafos (https://skafos.ai/).

Software Engineers and Data Scientists necessarily have different approaches to Machine Learning, sometimes putting them at odds; however, successfully applying ML requires both groups. Understanding both how a Machine Learning model works and how its predictions can be integrated into a product (and thus made useful) are equally critical. The next wave of applications will run on machine learning, so both developers and data scientists will need to be well versed in what it means to deploy models to the edge. In this meetup, we will highlight:

• An introduction to Machine Learning Deployment

• Why a walking skeleton is more important than a perfectly trained model

• Special considerations for ML on Edge Devices

• Use Case: Using an Image Classification model to detect Poison Ivy in an iOS app

• Use a pre-trained model to build an app that can distinguish Cats and Dogs

• Highlight how Juypter Labs can be used to replace the training data and retrain the model to identify Poison Ivy

• Push the retrained model to the app in real time

• Q&A

Dr. Miriam Friedel has spent over fifteen years in scientific and technical fields spanning theoretical physics, software engineering, transportation, neuroscience, and machine learning. She currently leads the data science team at Skafos, a start up in Charlottesville, VA. Skafos.ai is the ML platform for iOS developers, offering push-button deployment to the edge. Prior to her current role, Miriam was a Director and Senior Scientist at Elder Research, where she lead the commercial business unit and helped clients in a range of industries achieve ROI from machine learning. Her unique background helps her bridge the gap from technical details to strategic insights, increasing collaboration across disparate functional teams.

Miriam received her ScB in physics from Brown University and her PhD in Physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a co-author on over fifteen peer reviewed articles, and outside of work, spends as much time as possible practicing yoga and being with her two daughters.

This meetup is sponsored by our friends at the Richmond Office of Hays (https://www.hays.com/) who will be providing food and beverage for the evening.

This is going to be fantastic! I look forward to seeing everyone there!

Kevin