Embracing Open Source in a Large Enterprise

Do you want to learn how open source is being used in Telecommunications? Do you want to learn about Bell’s Data Science team culture and get career advice from data scientists and engineers? Come join us on April 10 at MaRS! WeCloudData is excited to collaborate with Bell Canada's Data Science Team to bring best practices in Telecom to our community!

KEYNOTE TOPICS
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1. Containerizing reinforcement-learning systems to make online business decisions as micro-services
   (Kevin Ferreira)

This talk will dive into the design details of a reinforcement learning (RL) web application system that aims to improve and automate the exploration/exploitation process for various business use-cases in Telecom. The system utilizes Docker containerization at all stages of its deployment pipeline. This system architecture is responsible for optimizing a number of business use-cases, and the technology stack includes Docker, Python, Flask, uWSGI, NGINX, PostgreSQL, and Redis

2. Identifying Bias in Deep or Opaque Models
   (Adrian Muresan)

One of the major reasons for many companies are shifting their data science work onto open source systems is the ability to build custom machine learning solutions with interesting new techniques. However, many of these techniques such as deep nets do not lend themselves to easy interpretation. This talk will go over some model agnostic methods to try to understand what biases a model has.

PANEL DISCUSSION
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• Championing open source in a large organization
• Flexibility vs. standardization
• The need for governance to ensure open source sustainability
• Building internal open source knowledge through collaboration

Data Science Career Paths
Day-to-Day Data Science

SPEAKERS and PANELISTS
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Rupinder Dhillon, Director of Data Science

Rupinder has worked in the field of BI and Advanced Analytics for over 15 years. She is now the Director of Machine Learning within the Customer Experience team at Bell Canada. She recently completed the EMBA at the Rotman School of Management (U of T) as well as the Machine Learning stream of Rotman’s Creative Destruction Lab program.

Kevin Ferreira, Senior Manager AI Labs

Kevin is motivated to develop data-driven solutions to solve large complex problems at Bell. He received his Ph.D. from U of T where his research included revenue management, social network, and word-of-mouth modelling.

Adrian Muresan, Senior Developer ML Architecture

Adrian responsible for the building, productionalization and monitoring of Bell’s modeling suite. He has a background in mathematics working in elliptic curve cryptography, and computer science working in modeling the behavior of tensegrity systems.

Denys Elliot, Manager Data Science

Denys focuses on base management and fraud predictive analytics. She has a background in teaching and has a Master’s degree is in Statistics.

Mohammad Salman, Data Scientist on the AI labs

Mo has a background in engineering and an MBA from Rotman. He focuses on R&D projects and their implementation.

Ather Qureshi, Data Scientist AI Labs

Ather has experience in data engineering and now transitioned to the data science/AI Labs team to explore modeling.

Susan Chang, Data Scientist Media and Segmentation

Susan has a Bachelor's and Master's in Economics and a hobbyist game developer for A Summer with a Shiba Inu.

Gagan Goel, Senior Data Engineer AI Labs

Gagan has extensive experience building large scale data processing pipelines using open source big data technologies.

Christopher Adkins

Chris is a developer set on destroying the siloed corporate culture. He ensures his team’s Python initiatives progress​ at an accelerated pace with modern techniques and CI/CD tooling.

Valerie Vezina, Manager Web Development

Valerie has a background in software engineering. She focuses on developing web applications and reports for field services BI team.