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GHOST DAY: Applied Machine Learning Conference

Created on: 2019.11.12

Last friday I went to the GHOST DAY Applied Machine Learning conference hosted at the Poznan University of Technology. This is a free event organized by the GHOST (Group of Horribly Optimistic STatisticians) student scientific group. Sponsors included Pearson, OLX Group, and more. So what is the goal of this conference? As described on the event website:

The aim of GHOST Day: AMLC is to create an outstanding space for exchanging experiences between machine learning practitioners and, most importantly, a friendly environment for updating knowledge in the rapidly changing area of data analysis. To this end, conference speakers will include several recognized representatives of the scientific community publishing at top-tier global conferences such as NeurIPS or ICML and numerous experts from companies constructing ML-based products such as Intel, IBM, Allegro or Pearson. The conference also wants to create a gateway for all talented and interested people who want to enter the fascinating world of data analysis and artificial intelligence.

Lectures

While, there were many lectures available, you had to pick the ones you want to go to during registration. I went to the following presentations:

  • Keynote lecture: “Quo vadis Reinforcement Learning?” by Wojciech Jaśkowski, PhD,
  • “Word sense disambiguation and mechanisms improving NLP” by Mateusz Półtorak,
  • “Debugging black-box NLP models” by Filip Graliński (presented by coworker),
  • “Is practical AutoML more than CASH?” by Alexandre Quemy,
  • “Scaling machine learning systems up to billions of predictions per day” by Carmine Paolino,
  • “Transfer learning in healthcare industry” by Michał Kierzynka,
  • “Making your neural networks pay more attention” by Dariusz Max Adamski,
  • “OCR for Data Extraction from Receipts” by Bartosz Ludwiczuk,
  • “GhostRacer - towards self-driving cars” by Jakub Tomczak.

Overall the presentations and topics were presented at a high level, making it really interesting to listen to all of those subjects. Planning to go there next year as well, maybe present something myself (now that I know how the presentations are constructed for this event).

PS. Attaching the presentation from Carmine Paolino due to personal interest and for future reference. This was a really good presentation and relevant to the problems we will face soon enough at Butter.