It was an enjoyable evening with another packed-house at Huckletree D2 for the seventh Data Science Ireland Meetup, as our guests had plenty to learn from with three more world-class presentations from a great line-up of speakers.

Kicking us off was Zalando’s engineering lead Adam Bermingham, as he presented on the amount of uncertainty world of machine learning and experiments. Using examples of his work with Zalando, he described how data science can drive real-world measurable impact in data-driven products at scale.

One of the really interesting examples from Adam’s presentation was the Black Ops project in which a colleague at Zalando developed a lightweight prototype including Color analysis algorithm (segmentation, clustering, indexing), Minimal UI and a Local Docker container. It is a risky project but when he presented it to key CEO’s and stakeholders, one person said it was “the best demo he had seen ever, period.”

He spoke about their really interesting work a company whose Stylists use colour analysis and search capability to decrease the time taken to curate and increase diversity, and quality in outfits and collections. Colour is very difficult to work with but by using tools such as Colour Search API and an annotator API, they created a platform driven by AI and machine learning to give customers the best experience possible. With Platform Thinking, you can efficiently develop new data science solutions and in turn, maximise impact with data science in your business.

Next up was the CEO at AYLIEN Parsa Ghaffari who spoke about the great work AYLIEN does in offering enterprises to extract actionable insights from streams of unstructured data to make better and faster decisions through their offerings, such as Text Analysis and Natural Language Processing.

However, there are plenty of challenges around NLP and one such is the vast amounts of complex unstructured data and the only way to solve this is through sophisticated technologies with near-human analysis capabilities. Parsa spoke about how AYLIEN are working to solve these problems from languages, to domains and tasks to NLP’s generalisation issues.

Parsa gave a brief overview of their platform and how they help companies analyse their unstructured data and use it to drive insights into their business. NLP is definitely a challenging area but Parsa believes it is the future. He discussed that some of the directions in which we are heading involve adapting models to new domains, learning how to transfer the knowledge, multi-task learning and also to inject common sense and inductive biases.

Last but not least was Suzanne Little, who serves as the Funded Investigator at DCU’s Insight Centre of Data Analytics and also lectures at the University’s School of Computing. Suzanne discussed how videos and images are used in many different ways to understand how people move around a stadium, to create safer driving experiences and for security applications.

As part of the Croke Park Smart Stadium project, DCU along with other organisations monitor such things as sound noise, crowd behaviour and pitch monitoring as part of the larger Smart Dublin initiative in creating a Living Lab for IoT  Solutions for Smarter Living. She shared some interesting examples from their discoveries All-Ireland Football final in 2017, including the fact that Mayo fans actually outcheered the Dubs.

Suzanne also shared interesting examples of videos detecting actions and scenarios in the car. Through Large-Scale Video Analytics, they can see the annotation and search of video data for ADAS and cartography, and Vision Inspired Driver Assistance System allows object tracking and path prediction for safer driving. However, some of the key challenges still with video and image analytics include can it be multi-modal, scalable, contactable and transferable.

A big thank you goes out to Adam, Parsa and Suzanne for their incredible presentations and of course to all out guests who came along on the evening. We hope everyone has a great time and there was definitely plenty of learnings to take away from these three incredible presentations.

Our next meetup takes place on Wednesday 3 October once again at Huckletree so keep an eye out on our meetup page for more details in the coming weeks.

AI Awards 2018: Applications Close 5pm This Friday!
Connecting Ireland’s AI ecosystem for a higher purpose

There is just a few more days for you be in with the chance to take part in the inaugural AI Awards and have the opportunity to showcase your skills and expertise to the AI community on the island of Ireland as the deadline closes at 5pm on Friday 14 September.

The AI Awards is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to promoting, advancing and rewarding corporate and academic excellence in Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovation, research & development and products.

It is our mission to support the AI community by recognising the hard work and dedication of those working in the field and to help promote and market Ireland globally as the first-choice home for AI investment and job creation in research and product development.

For more information about the awards, you can see more information here