Scotland Data Science & Technology MeetUp: Machine Learning made beautifully simple for everyone

Machine Learning made beautifully simple for everyone

Machine learning is quickly becoming a commodity, part of the standard toolbox of any business or activity that wants to extract actionable insights from its data pool. Besides cat recognition, predicting customer churn, helping medical diagnosis, red-flagging suspicious monetary transactions, or deciding whether a legal document is compliant are a few examples of problems where ML excels, providing answers that are faster, cheaper and more reliable than those of human experts alone.

While the underlying algorithms are certainly non-trivial, modern ML platforms such as BigML's are offering a simple interface to them (typically based on REST calls or similar API), making ML accessible to non-experts, and making it possible to incorporate ML techniques in wider contexts.

However, as a user of these services, it is important to have a good conceptual grasp of what kind of problems ML can and cannot solve, what kind of data is useful and what kind isn't, how to transform the latter to the former, and to have a good high-level understanding of what kinds of algorithms and techniques are at your disposal.

This talk will try to give you an introduction to these topics, using BigML to illustrate them (but without entering in the nitty-gritty details of the platform).

Speaker - Jose "jao" Ortega - Co-founder, Hacker at Large and CTO bigml.com

Linkedin - www.linkedin.com

Jose "jao" Ortega was a physicist studying gravitational waves in a former life, and turned to computers by the end of last century. His first projects where related to telecommunications software and then moved to startups using AI and ML in the days of the first web bubble.

Still in the startup space, he worked in cryptographic protocols for secure voting. After an interlude teaching programming and computer networks at the Autonomous U. of Barcelona, he participated in the development of software for the ESA LISA Pathfinder project, and then spent some time working at Google, which he left to help making Minority Report real at Oblong. In 2011, he co-founded BigML, where he's still hacking despite being its CTO, and has recently moved to Edinburgh, where BigML is planning to open his Alba Labs by the end of the year.

Agenda (The agenda may change as we are keen for this to be an interactive session with lots of questions)

6:30 PM – 7:00 PM: Networking
7:00 PM – 8.00 PM: Jose "jao" Ortega - Co-founder, Hacker at Large and CTO bigml.com
8.00 PM – 8.30 PM: Q & A Session
8.30 PM - 9.00 PM: Networking and Drink

to (Europe/London time)

More details and tickets: www.meetup.com

Imported From: www.meetup.com

More Information

This is a group for anyone interested in Data Science, Big Data, Analytics and Technology trends. We started this group to build a community to discuss general insights into the market and share personal experiences of working and operating in this area. We hope to cover skills shortages, technological advancements and organisational implications in Data Science and Technology during our series of meetups. All skill levels are welcome.