Machine Learning Clinic Expert Group meeting on 6th April 2017, Zurich
Data+Service is proud of its concept to reliably come up with innovations. We call it the “innovation funnel”: It is based on the belief that innovation happens when the right people with the right needs and ideas (and, yes, chemistry) meet and discuss; so we built a funnel of successively more concrete opportunities to meet, from broad and large conferences to smaller and more focused workshops – and finally expert groups. We assume that bringing together experts to discuss lessons learned as well as current challenges in an intimate setting leads sooner or later to innovative ideas, which can be fully developed outside of the group in a collaborative project.
The alliance is extremely happy that this happened successfully already at one of the first meetings of the expert group “Machine Learning Clinic”: While discussing use cases as well as personal interests, it became clear that several partner shared a common interest in the challenge of applying machine learning to itself – that is, in automating certain aspects of the process of build models of data by learning algorithms.
Originating in spirit from our member PwC, the idea was caught up by researchers from ZHAW and EPFL, and the trio had been busy during Nov-Jan to produce a proposal for funding to CTI. With great pleasure we can announce today that our proposal for “Ada – the artificial data analyst” has been accepted, and development will start soon to raise the productivity of data science endeavours by applying data science to itself (applying empirical optimisation also to algorithm and feature selection). Recent developments, e.g. from the MIT, are thus made available as a data product for Swiss industry.
Another CTI funded R&D project that came out of the “Machine Learning Clinic” is the QualitAI project between the ZHAW Datalab and the industrial member BW-TEC AG. This project will innovate in the area of deep learning on small data sets for industrial quality control on images.
The above 2 projects are examples of the first successful joint project applications between network members.
The Machine Learning Clinic expert group is going to meet again on the 6th of April 2017. The expert group is lead by Dr. Thilo Stadelmann from ZHAW as the academic lead and Mr. Michel Benard from Google Zurich as the industry lead. Participation is limited to the members of the Data+Service alliance, therefore if you are already a member and would like to participate in the meeting, directly get in touch with the leads. If however you are not a member of the alliance and would like to know about the various member benefits and the several membership plans, please get in touch with us.
We look forward to hearing from you and your participation in the group!