From ML Algorithms to ML Systems

I will present 10 lessons that we’ve learned from building battle-tested machine learning systems at Microsoft.

Dr. Kenneth Tran – Microsoft Research (USA)

Kenneth Tran is a Principal Research Engineer in the Deep Learning Group, Microsoft Research. His research expertise and experience includes Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Optimization, and Distributed Computing. At Microsoft, he led the research and development for strategic AI projects such as Deep Reinforcement Learning for real-world control problems, Project FarmBeats: AI & IoT for Agriculture, and Computer Vision API for Cognitive Services. In addition, Kenneth is also the chief mentor of Microsoft AI School’s advanced projects class. Kenneth received his Ph.D. in Computational & Applied Mathematics from The University of Texas at Austin.

AI Strategy and Implementation on Got It’s Knowledge as a Service Platform

Got It’s mission is to connect and economically empower people everywhere. We’re enabling knowledge to be traded directly between one human being and another. Got It’s Knowledge as a Service (KaaS) is delivered on-demand via a “knowledge-time” unit: a 10- or 20-minute chat session in which a user with a knowledge problem is connected immediately with a domain expert at a set price. And like many other services, KaaS guarantees a solution to your knowledge-based problem. While there are some specific expert-based services for specific topics, Got It’s KaaS is the first platform for multiple topics. In this talk we will present how Got It leverages AI to understand a user’s knowledge-based problem, match a problem with a suitable expert in seconds, audit chat sessions, and update expert’s ranking. We had amazing results, our AI powered KaaS platform already served over three million sessions from over twenty five thousand experts from seventy nine countries with great user satisfaction.

Dr. Hung Tran – Got It (USA)

Dr. Hung Tran is the founder of Got It, Inc., a tech startup developing the world’s first Knowledge as a Service (KaaS) platform to instantly connect a knowledge seeker with a vetted expert for an interactive and personalized explanation. Got It is led by an experienced executive team including former executives from tech giants like Google, Lyft, Rakuten, etc., and is headquartered in Silicon Valley with an engineering office in Hanoi, Vietnam. The company has raised $15M in funding from well-known investors in Silicon Valley like Capricorn Investment Group who is also an early investor of SpaceX, Tesla, and PlanetLabs.
Dr. Hung Tran received a VEF Fellowship in 2007 and obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science focusing on data mining and big data analytics from the University of Iowa. Prior to the Fellowship, he served as the leader of Vietnam OpenCourseWare Project working with MIT and Rice University to build a national scale open courseware program from inception to launch serving millions of college students in Vietnam. Dr. Tran received his Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology from Hanoi University of Science and Technology. He is also a recipient of numerous national and international technology and entrepreneurship awards.

AI2’s startup incubator: progress and directions

From Human Machine Interaction to Human Machine Intelligence

The levels of cooperation between HUMANS and MACHINES are in forms of Interaction, Integration, and Intelligence: Interaction can be described as stimulus-response which implies the Machines are just wait and do what Humans order; Integration implies partnership between the human and computer in which information is exchanged for physically WORKING together; Intelligence implies partnership between the human and computer in which information is exchanged for THINKING together. There is a continuum from Interaction to Integration then Intelligence. Doing research in HMI extends the level of human and machine cooperation from Interaction to Integration then Intelligence. I devote this talk in the discussion about the transformation from Interaction to Integration then Intelligence.

Assoc. Prof. Le Thanh Ha – Vietnam National University (Vietnam)

Le Thanh Ha received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Information Technology from the College of Technology, Vietnam National University, Hanoi. In 2005, he received a Korean Government Scholarship for Ph.D program at the Department of Electronics Engineering at Korea University and got Ph.D degree in 2010. After graduation, he joined the Faculty of Information Technology, University of Engineering and Technology, Vietnam National University, Hanoi as an Associate Professor. His research interests are image/video analysis and processing, satellite image processing and computer vision. He has deep experiences in teaching Digital Image Processing, Computer Vision, Multimedia Communication courses for both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. He has also been principle and main investigator of many fundamental research and technology development projects funded by both domestic and international organizations. He also makes contributions in serving many domestic and international ICT academic conferences including KSE, NICS, ATC, SoICT, ICEIC, … In addition, he is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), The Institude of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE) and The Vietnamese Association for Pattern Recognition (VAPR).

Pattern recognition: feature engineering and (deep) feature learning

Feature extraction is one of the most important steps in any pattern recognition tasks. The traditional approach is to design different types of local and global function to build-up the feature map. In contrast, the new deep architecture of convolutional neural networks automatically forms the feature maps by learning convolution operators. How the two approaches are similar and different is one main topic of this tutorial. The second topic of the talk is how context information is used in recognition tasks. Example in optical character recognition will be used to characterize the difference between the traditional dictionary/language model and recently emerging long sort-term memory networks.

Duc-Dung NGUYEN received the Bachelors degree in mathematics in 1994. He received the Masters and Ph.D. degrees in knowledge science from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, in 2003 and 2006, respectively.
He was a Research Engineer at KDDI R&D Laboratories Inc., Japan, from 2007 to 2009. He is now with the Institute of Information Technology, Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, Ha Noi, Vietnam. His research interests include machine learning, pattern recognition, and data mining. Dr. Nguyen was awarded the Innovative Medal from the Youth Union of Vietnam in 1998 for developing the first Vietnamese optical character recognition software, and the Technical Support Achievement Award in 2008 for his contributions at KDDI R&D Laboratories.