
AI and Machine Learning in the Enterprise
February 21-22, 2023
Day 1 | Tuesday, February 21
All times are US Central Standard Time (CST)
9.00AM – 10.00AM
Registration
10.00am - 10.10am
Introduction
10.10am - 10.40am
Data Science: From Ivory Tower Research to Impactful Product Teams
Mike Shores – Sr. Director – Data Science at Vista
Despite some companies still approaching data science as a pure research field, data science has become a time-tested, value-driving method for companies to solve customer problems. And for some companies that already recognize that data science is a value-creator, the path to unlocking that potential remains unclear. In this talk, we’ll discuss how embedding data scientists in customer-oriented product teams is a win-win-win recipe for customers, companies, and employees alike. We’ll talk through two specific use cases and how having clearly aligned customer problems, empowered teams and team members with the right technical skills is a recipe for success.
10.45am - 11.15am
AI in Health: Enabling Better Care
Ying Ding – Bill & Lewis Suit Professor at University of Texas at Austin
This talk will outline the current advances about applying AI technologies in medical imaging diagnosis, medical notes, and health risk prediction. The latest AI technologies include transformer, knowledge graph, and explainable AI. This talk summarizes the opportunities and challenges related to AI in health.
11.20am - 11.40am
Talk TBD
11.40AM – 12.00AM
Coffee Break & Networking
12.00am - 12.30pm
The Intelligence of Systems: Scaling Up Human-AI Collaboration for the New Frontier of Financial Cybersecurity
Kelly Tsao – UX Designer at Q2ebanking
Jesse Barbour – Chief Data Scientist at Q2ebanking
Intelligence is more than the human brain. This case study delves into the philosophical underpinnings of how artificial intelligence applied to financial technology problems at the enterprise or platform level reveals new powers of scale. Cognitive science and UX best practices enable effective human-computer-AI interaction at the individual level, which creates an emergent intelligence greater than the sum of its parts once connected to a diverse network of financial institutions.
12.35pm - 1.05pm
Overview of Explainable AI for Natural Language Processing
Jean-Leah Njoroge – Director Conversational AI/NLP at Lowe’s Home Improvement
Recent years have seen important advances in the quality of state-of-the-art models; however, this has come at the expense of models becoming less interpretable. In this talk, I will present an overview of the current state of Explainable AI (XAI), within the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP); the operations and explainability techniques currently available for generating explanations for NLP model predictions, to serve as a resource for model developers in the community.
1.05PM – 2.05PM
Lunch and Surprise Act
2:10pm - 2:55pm
Panel Discussion: Handling Technical Surprise in the Enterprise
3:00pm - 3:20pm
Talk by Anaconda
3:25pm - 3:55pm
ML-Powered Discounts: Helping Improve Financial Outcomes for Both Patients and Providers
Sumayah Rahman – Director of Data Science – Machine Learning and Infrastructure at Cedar
Discounting is a pricing technique that can be used to help customers (in our case, patients) to pay their bill. At Cedar, we believe that if discounting is done right at the point of engagement, there is an opportunity to make the cost of care more affordable, while also improving financial outcomes for providers. We applied ML to identify which patients would benefit from receiving a discount on their bill, but, like many ML projects, it was not as straightforward as it seemed. For example, we realized that the target variable for our model did not fully capture the outcome we are trying to optimize for: financial results. By digging into the data to more deeply understand trends in payment behavior, we took steps to build a more robust solution that works for both patients and providers—a journey that is still ongoing!
3.55PM – 4.15PM
Coffee Break & Networking
4:15pm - 4:45PM
Increasing Customer Satisfaction in the B2B Space Using ML
Astha Puri – Senior Data Scientist at Twilio
Most advanced ML techniques are applied in the B2C space to understand how customers behave, what their preferences are and how they are enjoying a particular product. But what if your business model is B2B? How do you understand customer satisfaction when your customer is a 50,000 people business entity? This talk focuses on leveraging ML to improve your business if you’re B2B (or even a small growing B2C).
4:50pm - 5:20PM
Talk TBD
Day 2 | Wednesday, February 22
All times are US Central Standard Time (CST)
8.00AM – 8.50AM
Registration
9.00am - 9.10am
Introduction
9.10am - 9.40am
The Two Sided Marketplace of Customer Service: Algorithmic Contact Assignment
Graham Ganssle – Head of Data Science, Sales and Customer Service at Wayfair
Wayfair may be a home goods retailer, but our customer service representatives are taxi drivers. Our customers are on the street wishing they could catch a ride. In this talk, I’ll describe the Uber of the customer service world: Wayfair’s Algorithmic Contact Assignment (ACA) product. ACA is an adaptive machine learning product that connects customer phone calls and chats to customer service agents. For each customer contact, ACA makes rider/driver-like connections in a hyper-personalized assignment that ensures the customer’s intent, the contact’s complexity, and the value-at-stake of the interaction are handled by the goldilocks agent (the agent with the single best natural proclivities to handle that contact juuuust right). The result is the customer gets what they need faster, happier, and with better resolutions. When customer Sarika got from the parking lot to the soccer field just in time to see her daughter’s first goal because she got off her call with a Wayfair returns specialist in 98 seconds, we knew ACA was perfect!
9.45am - 10.15am
Agile Data Science Teams
Randi Ludwig – Director, Data Science at Dell Technologies
Agile software development practices are great tools to increase visibility and productivity of any team writing code. However, the data science lifecycle has some particular differences from traditional software development that make it tricky to implement. Randi has led multiple teams of data scientists through the transition of adopting then thriving using modified Agile methodologies She will share tips and tricks for how to get the most value out of Agile in the ways that are most beneficial to the uncertain process of data science. She will also share an adoption roadmap to go from wild west data science to a well-oiled value factory!
10.20am - 10.40am
Talk by Atindriyo Sanyal
Atindriyo Sanyal – Co-Founder at Galileo
10.45am - 11.15am
Building Real Time HR Sourcing Recommendations
Kim Martin – Director, Software Engineering at Indeed
Hiring is a time-consuming part of a manager’s job. Hiring well is hard and impacts a company’s success. What if managers spent less time hiring really great people? This talk will explore some of the experiments and considerations at Indeed towards finding really great job applicants for any hiring manager.
11.15AM – 11.45AM
Coffee Break & Networking
11.35am - 12.05pm
Leveraging the Structure of Unstructured Data: Linguistics and NLP for Insights
Zach Childers – Manager, NLP & Machine Learning at Press Ganey
Investigation of attention mechanisms of BERT and other language models – neural and otherwise – have found that these models are often, to various degrees, implicitly learning details of syntactic structure and other linguistic features in the performance of natural language processing tasks (Clark et al. 2019, Goldberg 2019, Shi et al. 2016, inter alia).
While this might be heartening news to linguists, it raises the questions of whether these frameworks might be partially reinventing the wheel with respect to the scientific knowledge of language, and also of what further linguistic structures and phenomena might be exploited to supplement the statistical models.
In this talk, I discuss various ways of leveraging linguistic structure to improve and expand NLP performance, particularly in a pipeline architecture, with a focus on experience data in the healthcare domain.
12.10pm - 12.40pm
AI Governance for Building Responsible and Ethical AI Systems
Sweta Sinha – Director Data Science at Ascend Learning
AI has been a key driver in innovation in every industry Organizations have ramped up their effort on leveraging AI to gain a competitive advantage. However, AI solution comes with its own challenges and risk, particularly in regulated industries. There have been numerous instances when AI introduced bias, ethical and legal risks. Organizations must use a balanced approach to accelerating the adoption of AI and prioritize AI governance to ensure trust in the AI system. While AI regulation landscape is still evolving, now is the time for organizations to start taking steps to understand and mitigate AI risks. In this session you will learn about how organizations can embed AI governance principle into AI strategy and the platform for identifying and mitigating AI risk.
12.40PM – 1.40PM
Lunch and Surprise Act
1:45pm - 2:30pm
Panel Discussion
Graham Ganssle – Head of Data Science, Sales and Customer Service at Wayfair
Sweta Sinha – Director, Data Science at Ascend Learning
Alec Coughlin – Client Partner, Financial Services at LivePerson
2:35pm - 2:55pm
Talk TBD
3:00pm - 3:30pm
Talk by Kshetrajna Raghavan
Kshetrajna Raghavan – Staff Data Scientist at Shopify
3.30PM – 3.50PM
Coffee Break & Networking
3:50pm - 4:20PM
Augment, Don't Automate: Drawing Insights From Customer Feedback Using Natural Language Processing
Peter Grabowski – AUS Site Lead – Core Enterprise Machine Learning at Google
Companies are frequently faced with large amounts of unstructured text data, like forum comments or product reviews. Important trends can emerge in these datasets, but it can be time-consuming to read through comments, and keyword matching frequently misses critical nuances.
We’ll discuss how we’ve approached this problem at Google using Natural Language Processing, with examples of the approach applied to open datasets.
We’ll explore how this fits into the ML project lifecycle, with examples of common pitfalls. Finally, we’ll highlight how to use this technology as part of a “”human in the loop”” approach to supercharge your existing team members.