Agenda

Machine Learning Week Founder Eric Siegel will welcome you to the event and kick things off.

During the identification of a problem and root cause analysis, traditional approaches include employing statistical design of experiments (DOE). In this presentation, the limitations of DOE will be compared to the advantages of utilizing "Big Data" and machine learning to find solutions. A case study from a manufacturing process using synthetic data highlights the ability to find "hidden variables" that lead to better solutions. By examining data from a whole process rather a narrow band available through DOE, the investigation is more effective with better results. The benefits of machine learning and model tournaments are highlighted.

At Northwestern we have developed a system that is built to consume and capitalize on IoT infrastructure by ingesting device data and employing modern machine learning approaches to infer the status of various components of the IoT system. It is built on several open source components with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence. We will discuss its distinguishing features of being Kubernetes native and by employing our work that enables features to be specified through a flexible logic which is propagated throughout the architectural components. We will discuss select use cases implemented in the platform and the underlying benefits. The audience will learn how to build or use a streaming solution based on Kubernetes and open source components.

Industry 4.0 is here. AI, big data, the cloud, robotics, and smart devices are the enablers for building next-gen businesses. We need to focus on building skills to use these technologies that can dramatically multiply any business by strategically using data’s latent, transformative potential.

Join our speaker Asha Saxena CEO at Women Leaders in Data and AI [WLDA.TECH], Adjunct Professor at Columbia University and Author of The AI Factor, discuss the best practices, frameworks and how-to build tangible skills as a leader in today's business world.

Within the Human Resources industry there are still many challenges ahead, for example, keyword-based searches or manual resume screening could contribute to omitting valuable opportunities or lengthy hiring procedures. For this reason, we would like to present a novel Recommendation System in the field of HR, which includes a series of Natural Language Processing techniques and Deep Learning models, that allow us to achieve a fully automated process that will propose semantically related and explainable suggestions to job seekers and companies in real-time. The system architecture combines several NLP techniques, such as named entity recognition, text classification, and entity relationships based on HR data, to extract and process more than 50 different characteristics of job postings and resumes, such as occupations, skills, education, etc., with various granularity levels and multiple languages.

We illustrate here a Living Digital Twin of a fleet of Electric Vehicles that gives actionable predictions of battery degradation over time. Since each vehicle takes a different route and has different charging and discharging cycles over its lifetime, the battery degradation for each vehicle will be different. We use a scalable predictive modeling framework deployed across a distributed computing architecture in the cloud to make individualized predictions for each EV battery in the fleet to reflect the degraded performance accurately. The neural network battery model is calibrated using the parameters that had the most significant impact on the output voltage through the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) method, which is a Bayesian technique for parameter estimation of non-linear system behavior. We simulated in-production real-world operations by having the vehicles “drive” the routes using synthetic datasets and showed how the calibrated model provide more accurate estimates of battery degradation. Using a Living Digital Twin to calculate the remaining range and battery State of Health addresses problems of range anxiety in the EV automotive industry and can drive the value of EVs in the market.

ML’s great strength is that example cases are all you need to create a predictive model. The predictions work as long as the underlying process is not tampered with. But clients usually seek more: they yearn to understand the "data-generating machinery” in order to improve the outcome that the model predicts. Yet, this is dangerous without additional external information, including the direction of influence between variables. This talk illustrates how to achieve “peak interpretability” by using influence diagrams to model causal relationships, avoid mistaking correlation for causation, and quantify how outcomes will change when we manipulate key values.

The largest issue ML teams face is due to AI models that silently fail. Silent failure occurs when model performances gradually degrade over time without showing any apparent signs of failure. These signs are therefore difficult to catch in time, usually leading to sudden or abrupt drops in performance after the gradual decline. This leads to a heavy impact on not just ML or business teams but also on the customer who faces the repercussions of incorrect predictions.

Pioneering tech giants have been managing silent model failures with AI Observability, and the positive results continue to encourage the AI industry to adopt observability practices. Observable AI enables a continuous collection of data from multiple touchpoints to deliver insights for improved model performance in production. It can be broken down into three high-level components: Monitoring, Explainability, and Accountability.

• automate model monitoring
• dive deeper with root cause analysis to explain model decisions
• proactively troubleshoot your models to build reliable and compliant solutions that are resistant to silent model failures

Supply chains have been very lean for decades, and the challenges in the last few years have led more teams to focus on resiliency. With the quantity of data available across manufacturing, shipping, stocking, and inventory, teams can turn to analytics to improve the resiliency of supply chains. This talk will highlight how analytics has helped improve supplier reliability, decrease sourcing costs, and quantify the true risk of supply chain disruption.

Ask our “Rockstars” anything about predictive analytics! Curious about machine learning tips, tricks, best practices and more? This is your opportunity to hear advice directly from the experts. The hardest part of machine learning can be getting models deployed into production. Our panel has done it, and is willing to spill the tea on how to make it happen. You’ll want to stick around for this ultimate session of the conference.