Highlights from the 9th Machine Learning Expert Group Meeting

The 9th Machine Learning Expert Group Meeting was held on February 12, 2019 at SAP in Regensdorf. About 30 participants attended from industry (SAP, Swisscom, Pax, SBB, ELCA, Google, D-One, Mobiliar, Wincasa, Siemens, etc.) and academia (CSEM, ZHAW, HSLU, FFHS, etc.).

First, Dr. Sean Kask, Senior Expert & Business Developer, SAP Leonardo Machine Learning, SAP (Switzerland) AG, gave a presentation on Machine Learning for Business at SAP, and introduced the audience to several Machine Learning examples what customers across the world today are implementing to optimize their Business processes.

Then Sergio Jimenez Otero, Data Scientist and Carl Anners, Analytics Consultant at Swisscom described the work and project on the Swisscom internal Predictive Carrier Billing, giving insights to technologies used as well as the outlook for further developing the use case.

A workshop was then held on two machine learning problems shown by PAX Lebensversicherung. Martin Weber-Nisslé, Leiter Softwareentwicklung, and Laurent

Szymkowiak, Leiter Softwareentwicklung Backoffice Applications initially introduced the challenges of the industry as well as their targets for their Machine Learning projects and facilitated very fruitful discussions.

Last but not least, Enrique Alfonseca, Research Manager at Google, gave a presentation on the research work  of his team on NLP & Conversational search in the Google Assistant.

The meeting was concluded by an apéro, during which attendees exchanged further on the different topics and traded business cards and coordinates for further interactions.

Many thanks to Michael Probst and Sebastian Folk from SAP for hosting us in Regensdorf and allowing us to run a very productive meeting!