Machine Learning Clinic goes Suisse Romande

The 7th Machine Learning Clinic Expert Group meeting was held at the new ELCA Innovation Lab on the EPFL campus on May 3, 2018. We were hosted by Silvia Quarteroni, Senior Manager at ELCA in Lausanne (thanks a lot!).

In her talk, Silvia discussed the main “hard nuts to crack” in applied machine learning in the context of ELCA’s customer projects and R&D: “Since we have a strong focus on natural language processing, many of our issues and opportunities concern subjects such as language modelling for natural language understanding, dialogue management in virtual assistants, and dealing with the complex linguistic landscape of Switzerland.” However, the talk also presented challenges in image analysis, speech processing and statistical prediction.

Martin Jaggi, Assistant Professor at EPFL, gave a presentation about his current research work on Unsupervised Machine Learning for Text, which is performed in the EPFL Machine Learning and Optimization Laboratory. Martin showed methods to analyse large scale data, including distributed training algorithms to optimize the training time. Results were given for several industrial systems (from IBM, Google and other providers) which implement these algorithms. We had a discussion on benchmarking the performance of different systems for such tasks.

The next ML Clinic meeting will be held in September. Stay tuned!