At idealo.de we store and display millions of images. Our gallery contains pictures of all sorts. You’ll find there vacuum cleaners, bike helmets as well as hotel rooms. Working with huge volume of images brings some challenges: How to organize the galleries? What exactly is in there? Do we actually need all of it?

To tackle these problems you first need to label all the pictures. In 2018 our Data Science team completed four projects in the area of image classification. In 2019 there were many more to come. Therefore, we decided to automate this process by creating a software we called Image ATM (Automated Tagging Machine). With the help of transfer learning, Image ATM enables the user to train a Deep Learning model without knowledge or experience in the area of Machine Learning. All you need is data and spare couple of minutes!

In this talk we will discuss the state-of-art technologies available for image classification and present Image ATM in the context of these technologies. We will then give a crash course of our product where we will guide you through different ways of using it - in shell, on Jupyter Notebook and on the Cloud. We will also talk about our roadmap for Image ATM.

It is too tedious to keep on asking questions, seek explanations or set thresholds for trends or anomalies. Why not find problems before they happen, find explanations for the glitches and suggest shortest paths to fixing them? Businesses are always changing along with their competitive environment and processes. No static model can handle that. Using dynamic models that find time-delayed interactions between multiple time series, we need to make proactive forecasts of anomalous trends of risks and opportunities in operations, sales, revenue and personnel, based on multiple factors influencing each other over time. We need to know how to set what is “normal” and determine when the business processes from six months ago do not apply any more, or only applies to 35% of the cases today, while explaining the causes of risk and sources of opportunity, their relative directions and magnitude, in the context of the decision-making and transactional applications, using state-of-the-art techniques.

Real world processes and businesses keeps changing, with one moving part changing another over time. Can we capture these changing relationships? Can we use multiple variables to find risks on key interesting ones? We will take a fun journey culminating in the most recent developments in the field. What methods work well and which break? What can we use in practice?

For instance, we can show a CEO that they would miss their revenue target by over 6% for the quarter, and tell us why i.e. in what ways has their business changed over the last year. Then we provide the prioritized ordered lists of quickest, cheapest and least risky paths to help turn them over the tide, with estimates of relative costs and expected probability of success.

Ending poverty and zero hunger are top two goals United Nations aims to achieve by 2030 under its sustainable development program. Hunger and poverty are byproducts of multiple factors and fighting them require multi-fold effort from all stakeholders. Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning has transformed the way we live, work and interact. However economics of business has limited its application to few segments of the society. A much conscious effort is needed to bring the power of AI to the benefits of the ones who actually need it the most – people below the poverty line. Here we present our thoughts on how deep learning and big data analytics can be combined to enable effective implementation of anti-poverty programs. The advancements in deep learning , micro diagnostics combined with effective technology policy is the right recipe for a progressive growth of a nation. Deep learning can help identify poverty zones across the globe based on night time images where the level of light correlates to higher economic growth. Once the areas of lower economic growth are identified, geographic and demographic data can be combined to establish micro level diagnostics of these underdeveloped area. The insights from the data can help plan an effective intervention program. Machine Learning can be further used to identify potential donors, investors and contributors across the globe based on their skill-set, interest, history, ethnicity, purchasing power and their native connect to the location of the proposed program. Adequate resource allocation and efficient design of the program will also not guarantee success of a program unless the project execution is supervised at grass-root level. Data Analytics can be used to monitor project progress, effectiveness and detect anomaly in case of any fraud or mismanagement of funds.

Despite the increasing number of data scientists who are asked to take on leadership roles as they grow in their careers, there are still few resources on how to lead data science teams successfully.

In this talk, I will argue that an effective data science leader has to wear three hats: Diplomat (understand the organization and their team and liaise between them), Diagnostician (figure out how what organizational needs can be met by their team and how), and Developer (grow their and their team's skills as well as the organization's understanding of data science to maximize the value their team can drive).

Throughout, I draw on my experience as a data science leader both at a political party (the Democratic Party of the United States of America) and at a fintech startup (Even.com).

{ This is a handson workshop in pgmpy package. The creator of pgmpy package Abinash Panda will do the code demonstration }

Crude oil plays an important role in the macroeconomic stability and it heavily influences the performance of the global financial markets. Unexpected fluctuations in the real price of crude oil are detrimental to the welfare of both oil-importing and oil-exporting economies.Global macro hedge-funds view forecast the price of oil as one of the key variables in generating macroeconomic projections and it also plays an important role for policy makers in predicting recessions.

Probabilistic Graphical Models can help in improving the accuracy of existing quantitative models for crude oil price prediction as it takes in to account many different macroeconomic and geopolitical variables .

Hidden Markov Models are used to detect underlying regimes of the time-series data by discretising the continuous time-series data. In this workshop we use Baum-Welch algorithm for learning the HMMs, and Viterbi Algorithm to find the sequence of hidden states (i.e. the regimes) given the observed states (i.e. monthly differences) of the time-series.

Belief Networks are used to analyse the probability of a regime in the Crude Oil given the evidence as a set of different regimes in the macroeconomic factors . Greedy Hill Climbing algorithm is used to learn the Belief Network, and the parameters are then learned using Bayesian Estimation using a K2 prior. Inference is then performed on the Belief Networks to obtain a forecast of the crude oil markets, and the forecast is tested on real data.

With the rise of cloud, distributed architectures, containers, and microservices, a rise in data overload is visible. With growing amounts of DevOps processes; alerts, repeated mundane jobs etc. have put new demands to both synthesize meaning from this influx of information and connect it to broader business objectives.

AIOps is the application of artificial intelligence for IT operations. AIOps uses machine learning and data science to give IT operations teams a real-time understanding of any issues affecting the availability or performance of the systems under their care. Rather than reacting to issues as they arise in the application environment, AIOps platforms allow IT operations teams to proactively manage performance challenges faster, and in real-time

This case study focuses on solving the following business needs:

1. With an ever-increasing rise in alerts, a large number of incidents were getting generated. There was a need to develop a framework that can generate correlations and identify correlated events, thereby reduce overall incidents volume.

2. For many incidents a reactive strategy does not work and can lead to a loss of reputation; there was a need to develop predictive capabilities that can detect anomalous events and predict critical events well in advance.

3. Given the pressures of reducing the Resolution time and short window of opportunity available to the analysts, there was a need to provide search capabilities so that the analysts can have a head start as to how similar incidents were solved in past.

Data from multiple systems sending alerts, including traditional IT monitoring, log events in text format, application and network performance data etc were made available for the PoC.

The solution framework developed had a discovery phase where the base data was visualized and explored, a NLP driven text mining layer where log data in text format was pre-processed, clustered and correlations were developed to identify related events using Machine Learning algorithms. Topic Mining was used to get a quick overview of a large number of event data. Next, a temporal mining layer explored the temporal relationship between nodes and cluster groups, necessary features were developed on top of the associations generated from temporal layers. Advanced Machine learning algorithms were then developed on these features to predict critical events almost 12 hours in advance. Last but not the least a search layer that computed the similarity of any incident with those in Service Now database was developed that provided analysts insights readily available information on similar incidents and how they were solved in past so that the analysts do not have to reinvent the wheel.

Incident volume reduction is one of the top priorities for any large-scale service organization along with timely resolution of incidents within the specified SLA parameters. AI and Machine learning solutions can help IT service desk manage the Incident influx as well as resolution cost by

• Identifying major topics from incident description and planning resource allocation and skill-sets accordingly
• Producing knowledge articles and resolution summary of similar incidents raised earlier

• Analyzing Root Causes of incidents and introducing processes and automation framework to predict and resolve them proactively

We will look at different approaches to combine standard document clustering algorithms such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and K-mean clustering on doc2vec along-with Text classification to produce easily interpret-able document clusters with semantically coherent/ text representation that helped IT operations of a large FMCG client identify key drivers/topics contributing towards incident volume and take necessary action on it.