Event 2: "Alexa, help me find music"

Join us for our 2nd event of The Reboot on August 2nd, 2022, 6PM, at the Variety Room in downtown San Francisco! Our event will feature a special music performance by Antonette Goroch and presentations by Francois Mairesse and Doug Colaizzo. This is an inclusive event, open to everyone, and we will be providing food and drinks.

Can't make it in person?
Join us LIVE on Twitch, see https://twitch.tv/therebootcommunity

MUSICAL GUEST
Artist: Antonette Goroch
Listen: https://linktr.ee/AntoKayGee

TALK 1: "Make every day a hack day"
Speaker: Doug Colaizzo (Sr. Software Development Engineer, Amazon Music)
Description: Every day should be a hack day. Learn what a hack day is, our lessons learned and how we continually work toward our goal of making every day a hack day.

TALK 2: "Alexa, help me find music"
Speaker: Francois Mairesse (Sr. Applied Scientist, Amazon Music)
Description: Conversation is easy, but effective conversation is hard. Learn how the Amazon Music Conversations team replaced a rule-based system with machine learning to make conversations with Alexa better than ever. We will introduce basics of machine learning, conversational recommenders, the exploration/exploitation trade off, and offline reinforcement learning, in order to build conversational systems that maximize user engagement by learning what to say and when to say it.

Amazon Science blog: https://www.amazon.science/latest-news/how-amazon-music-uses-recommendation-system-machine-learning
RecSys 2021 paper abstract: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3460231.3474600