Girl Geek X MosaicML Lightning Talks with OpenAI, Meta AI, Salesforce Research, Atomwise, Amazon Web Services, Hala Systems (Video + Transcript)

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Over 120 girl geeks joined networking and talks at the sold-out MosaicML Girl Geek Dinner from women working in machine learning at MosaicML, Meta AI, Atomwise, Salesforce Research, OpenAI, Amazon, and Hala Systems.

Speakers discuss efficient machine learning training with MosaicML, reinforcement learning, ML-based drug discovery with AtomNet, evaluating recommendation robustness with RGRecSys, turning generative models into products at OpenAI, seeking the bigger picture at AWS, and more.

Table of Contents

  1. Welcome – Julie Choi, VP and Chief of Growth at MosaicMLwatch her talk or read her words

  2. Making ML Training Faster, Algorithmically – Laura Florescu, AI Researcher at MosaicMLwatch her talk or read her words

  3. Reinforcement Learning: A Career Journey – Amy Zhang, Research Scientist at Meta AIwatch her talk or read her words

  4. Addressing Challenges in Drug Discovery – Tiffany Williams, Staff Software Engineer at Atomwisewatch her talk or read her words

  5. Evaluating Recommendation System Robustness – Shelby Heinecke, Senior Research Scientist at Salesforce Researchwatch her talk or read her words

  6. Turning Generative Models From Research Into Products – Angela Jiang, Product Manager at OpenAIwatch her talk or read her words

  7. Seeking the Bigger Picture – Banu Nagasundaram, Machine Learning Product Leader at Amazon Web Serviceswatch her talk or read her words

  8. 10 Lessons Learned from Building High Performance Diverse Teams – Lamya Alaoui, Director of People Ops at Hala Systemswatch her talk or read her words

Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

Transcript of MosaicML Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

Angie Chang: Thank you so much for coming out. I’m so glad you’re here. My name is Angie Chang and I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. We’ve been doing Girl Geek Dinners in the San Francisco Bay Area for, if you can believe it, almost 15 years now. It’s the first Girl Geek Dinner in over two years, because Julie is a rock star and wanted to do a Girl Geek Dinner in person in the pandemic and we’re like, “Yes!” It was postponed and now in May, we’re finally doing this event. I’m so glad that we have a sold out event of amazing women in machine learning that we’re going to be hearing from tonight!

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Girl Geek X founder Angie Chang welcomes the sold-out crowd to our first IRL Girl Geek Dinner in over two years during the pandemic! (Watch on YouTube)

Angie Chang: I don’t want to steal too much of the time, but I wanted to do a quick raffle of a tote bag that I have. I’m going to ask, who has been to the first Girl Geek Dinner and can name a speaker from that event? Sometimes I meet people who have. Are we making this really hard? Okay, the first Girl Geek Dinner was at Google. We had over 400 women show up for a panel of inspiring women. I just wanted to see because that’s a lot of people. Who thinks they’ve been to the most Girl Geek Dinners in the room? Okay.

Audience Member: It’s actually not me, but like, this clutch was designed by somebody who hates women because its super heavy – and I see that that [Girl Geek X tote] has handles.

Angie Chang: Okay, so we have a full agenda of machine learning lightning talks and I’m going to introduce you to our host for tonight. Julie Choi is the Chief Growth Officer of MosaicML and she is an amazing supporter of women and I would like to invite her up.

Julie Choi: Oh, thank you. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for coming out to the MosaicML Girl Geek Dinner. I am Julie Choi and I actually did go to the first Girl Geek Dinner. I want to thank Angie Chang and the Girl Geek Dinner organization. Angie has just been a pioneer and truly, just a very special person, bringing us together ever since, was that 2010 or something, I don’t know. When was that?

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MosaicML VP and Chief Growth Officer Julie Choi welcomes the audience. She emcees the evening at MosaicML Girl Geek Dinner. (Watch on YouTube)

Angie Chang: The first event was 2008.

Julie Choi: 2008. Yes. And tonight we have amazing speakers to share with us about machine learning, about engineering, about diversity, and how that can really supercharge productivity in high growth organizations and machine learning research just from some of the world’s best AI companies and organizations.

Julie Choi: Our first speaker of the evening is my dear colleague at MosaicML, Laura Florescu. Laura and I met a little over a year ago. You greeted me at the front door. You were the first face I saw at MosaicML. She has just been an inspiration to me as an ML researcher at our company. Prior to joining MosaicML, Laura actually worked at several unicorn AI hardware startups. Then prior to that, she got her PhD from NYU in mathematics and is just a brilliant lady. Laura, can you come up and tell us about this amazing topic?

Laura Florescu: Thank you.

Julie Choi: Let’s give her a hand.

Laura Florescu: Can you hear me? Hi, thank you so much everybody for being here. Thanks to Julie, Sarah, Angie, Playground, for having this event. Very honored to be here.

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MosaicML AI Researcher Laura Florescu talks about making ML training faster, algorithmically with Composer and Compute, MosaicML’s latest offerings for efficient ML. (Watch on YouTube)

Laura Florescu: As Julie said, I’m a researcher at MosaicML. A little bit about myself. I’m originally from Romania. I came to the states, did my undergrad in math, did a PhD at NYU, and then I got the kind of Silicon Valley bug. And now I’m at MosaicML. And so what we do is develop algorithms and infrastructure to train neural networks efficiently.

Laura Florescu: Basically for the people in the audience who are not into ML, training neural networks is at the core of artificial intelligence. It uses a lot of data. It’s applied to many different fields with image, language, speech, and kind of like a takeaway from this is that, for large powerful models, the training costs for one single run can get in the millions of dollars, to train one such model. And in order to get to a really good model, you need to do several such runs. So the cost can get extremely, extremely expensive.

Laura Florescu: Our belief at MosaicML is that state of the art, large, powerful models should not be limited to just the top companies. As we have seen over the last few years, the costs are getting larger and larger due to both the size of the models, also the data that the models ingest is just exploding.

Laura Florescu: A couple of years ago, a state-of-the-art model, Megatron, actually cost $15 million to train. As you can imagine, startups probably cannot really train models like that. And at MosaicML, this is our belief, that this kind of training should be accessible to other partners as well.

Laura Florescu: That’s where we come in. We want the state-of-the-art efficient ML training. Our co-founders are Naveen and Hanlin from Nirvana and Intel AI. Also, founding advisors from MIT and also founding engineers from leading AI companies. All of us have the same kind of goal to train machine learning basically faster and better and cheaper.

Laura Florescu: Our thesis is, the core of Mosaic is that algorithmic and system optimizations are the key to ML efficiency, right? And then the proof to that so far, is that we are working with enterprises to train ML models efficiently. And we want to enable our organizations to train the best ML models, the cheapest and the most efficient.

Laura Florescu: Some results that we already have. As I said, we want to be agnostic about the kind of models, data that we ingest. For some image classification tasks, we have shown 6x speed ups, like 6x cheaper, faster than like regular training. About 3x faster for image segmentation, about 2x for language models, language generation, and 1.5x for language understanding. We have been around as Julie said for about a year, a year and a few months, and these are already some of the results that we have achieved.

Laura Florescu: A use case is to train NLP models, such as BERT, for those of you who know that, and on our specific platform and without algorithms. Use case is for example, to increase sales productivity. If you see there, on our MosaicML 4-node, with our speed ups, which I’m going to discuss in a little bit, we can see up to 2x speed ups of training such models. And also about 60% training costs reduced by training with both our algorithms and on our platform, on our cloud.

Laura Florescu: The MosaicML cloud, we want it to be the first AI optimized cloud designed specifically for AI and directly to reduce training cost at any layer of the stack. For example, in the training flow, we want to reuse data from past runs. In the models that we’re using, so that’s where the kind of optimized model definitions come in, Composer, which is our open source library. We are doing the algorithmic speed ups, the training. And kind of like at the lower level, we want to also be able to choose the best hardware in order to get to the lowest training cost. At each layer, we are optimizing all of these system optimizations and composing all of those basically leads to the best training runs.

Laura Florescu: As I mentioned, Composer is our open source library. We have a QR code there if you want to check it out. We have about 25+ algorithms that we have worked on and given the name, they compose together, and that’s how we achieve basically the best, 2x to 5x speed ups. And as an example, for a BERT model, we have seen 2.5x speed up for pre-training, which as you can see, goes from nine days to about three days. That’s a huge win. Check it out if you would like. As I said, open source, so we’re always looking for feedback and contributions.

Laura Florescu: We’re open to partnering with any kind of corporate users, for anybody who has vision or language tasks, and then also industry, we want to be industry agnostic and global. Again, we want to optimize basically any kind of models. And as I said, the open source Composer speed up, we’re open to feedback and partnerships for that as well. And of course we are hiring. Yeah, it’s a really great team, really fun, really ambitious. And I’m so honored to work there and we’re looking for all kind of builders, engineers, researchers, products. And thank you very much.

Julie Choi: Thank you so much, Laura. Okay, that was wonderful. Let me just go to the next talk. Our next speaker is Amy Zhang, and Amy comes to us from, she’s currently a research scientist at Meta AI research, and a postdoc I think, you’re not a postdoc anymore, are you?

Amy Zhang: It’s kind of like a part-time thing.

Julie Choi: It’s like, never ending, huh? But you’re on your way to your assistant professorship at UT Austin, amazing, in Spring 2023. And Amy’s work focuses on improving generalization and reinforcement learning through bridging theory and practice. And her work, she was on the board most recently of women in machine learning for the past two years. And she got her PhD at McGill University and the Mila Institute and prior to that obtained her M.Eng. in EECS and dual Bachelors of Science degrees in math and EECS at MIT. Let’s welcome Amy Zhang to the stage. Thank you.

Amy Zhang: Thank you Julie for the really kind introduction and for planning this amazing event. It’s so nice to see people in real life. This is my first large in-person talk in over two years so please bear with me.

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Meta AI Research Scientist Amy Zhang speaks about her career journey in reinforcement learning, from academia to industry, at MosaicML Girl Geek Dinner. (Watch on YouTube)

Amy Zhang: Today I’ll be talking about my research which is in reinforcement learning, but I first wanted to just give a little bit of introduction of myself. To me, I feel like I’ve had a fairly meandering journey through academia and industry and research in general. I wanted to give a little bit of introduction of what I’ve done so that if any of you feel like you’re going through something similar, please reach out and I’m happy to chat and give more details. Like Julie said, I did my undergrad at MIT, a year after I finished my masters, I started a PhD at UCSD. It did not go well, through no one’s fault, really. I just felt really isolated and so after about a year, I quit my PhD, meandered through a couple of startups, and then eventually found my way to Facebook, which is now Meta.

Amy Zhang: At Facebook, I initially started on the core data science team. I was a data scientist, but I was working on computer vision and deep learning. This was 2015, still fairly early days in terms of deep learning and everyone is really excited about the gains that it had shown for computer vision at the time. I was working on population density, so we were taking satellite images and doing building detection to find houses, to figure out mostly in third world countries, what the population density was so that we could provide internet to people and figure out what was the best way to provide that internet.

Amy Zhang: After about a year of that, I ended up joining the Facebook AI research team FAIR, as a research engineer. And after about a year of that, I happened to meet the person who became my PhD advisor, Joelle Pineau, who is now director of FAIR, and I got to do my PhD with her at McGill University while still staying in FAIR. Fast forward a few more years and I defended my PhD remotely in the middle of the pandemic last year and am now back in the Bay Area as a research scientist at FAIR and like I said, was part-time postdoc-ing at UC Berkeley.

Amy Zhang: After spending all this time in industry, and having a really great time in industry, and getting all of these amazing opportunities to do my PhD while in industry, with all of the nice resources that that provides, I decided to go back into academia. And, last year I was on the faculty market, on the academic faculty market, and I accepted a position at UT Austin. I will be starting there next year as an assistant professor.

Amy Zhang: With that, I’m just going to jump straight into my research. And this is going to be, again like I said, a very whirlwind, high level overview. I’m passionate about reinforcement learning. I love the idea of agents that can interact with the world, with us, and it can grow and learn from that interaction.

Amy Zhang: Okay, thinking a little bit about what reinforcement learning (RL) can do. I’m personally really excited about the idea of applying reinforcement learning to solve real world problems. To me, this is personalized household robots, having a robot that will do your dishes, clean the house, make your bed, learned autonomous driving so you can just drive in a car without having to actually drive and pay attention to the road, and personalize healthcare, so having like a robo-doctor who knows everything about you and can personalize healthcare and give recommendations for you specifically.

Amy Zhang: Unfortunately we are not there yet, as I think maybe all of us can tell. Deep reinforcement learning has had a lot of successes in the last two years. Maybe some of these things are familiar to you. AlphaGo, where we have an RL agent that was able to beat the best human experts. OpenAI with playing video games, which I’m not very familiar with, but like Dota and StarCraft. These are the things that have been hitting the news in terms of what Deep RL is capable of. But there are still a lot of disappointing failures and I think none of these videos are going to show, but imagine this robot trying to kick this ball and then just falling flat on its face. That’s what that video is. And in the other little cheetah looking thing is supposed to be like tripping and falling. Anyway, this is where we are currently with RL.

Amy Zhang: Why do we still see this discrepancy? How are we getting these amazing gains but still seeing these failures? And what we’re really seeing is that Deep RL works really well in these single task settings, in simulation, when you have access to tons and tons of training data, but it works less well in visually complex and natural settings. Basically we’re not seeing the same type of generalization performance that we’ve been getting out of deep learning in computer vision and natural language processing. My research agenda is mainly about how can we achieve RL in the real world? How can we solve these problems? And, to me, it seems that abstraction is one key to generalization. And I use this type of idea to develop algorithms that have theory-backed guarantees.

Amy Zhang: I’m going to not really talk a little bit about this math, but I’m particularly interested in being able to train reinforcement learning agents that can solve tasks from pixels. Imagine that you have this household robot or this autonomous driving car that is receiving information about the world through a camera, through RGB input, and that’s a big part of how we also perceive the world. There are things in this image that are relevant for the autonomous driver here and there are things that are not. And we want to figure out how can we determine from just a reward signal, what things are relevant versus irrelevant.

Amy Zhang: I’m just going to, as part of this project, we developed this representation learning method using this idea by simulation, and showed that in this type of simulation driving task, which is done in this platform called Carla, so we have just this figure eight simulation environment where this car is just driving along this highway, and there’s lots of other cars in the road and basically, it’s designed to try and drive as quickly as possible. Using the break as little as possible and maximizing throttle while also not hitting anything. And we find that our method which can basically ignore these kind of irrelevant details and figure out what things are irrelevant does much better compared to a lot of existing methods.

Amy Zhang: One really cool thing is that when we look at the representation that we actually learn here, and we look at what kind of observations get mapped to be close together in this representation space, so what information is actually getting captured by this representation, we see that… this is the agent’s point of view. We see that, in these three examples, you’re always on this straight road where you have an obstacle on the right hand side. It doesn’t matter what the obstacle is, but the representation just captures that something is there, which means that you can’t turn right. This is just kind of an example of what our algorithm can do. And unfortunately I’m going to skip over this, because these were just some videos showing what our agent can do.

Amy Zhang: I just wanted to end on talking about some open problems that I’m particularly excited about. I’m particularly excited about compositionality. How can we solve combinatorially difficult problems. And these correspond to a lot of real world tasks that we should care about. When we think about really simple versions of problems like this, you can have a block stacking task. You can have any number of blocks or any combination of blocks and so you can always have new environments that you give to your agent to try and solve.

Amy Zhang: Similarly, moving more towards actual real world problems that we care about. Again, going back to the dishwasher example or an agent that is trying to move boxes around in a warehouse. These are all settings where the exact environment, the exact state that the agent has to deal with, is constantly different. The objects that you want to place in your dishwasher on a day to day basis is always going to look different. How can we get agents that can actually generalize to all of these new states?

Amy Zhang: I think one really exciting direction to go when trying to solve this type of problem is to think about factorization. How can we break down a problem into smaller, easier building blocks? So if we understand how one block, the dynamics of one block moves, so creating a stack of two blocks, right? Babies play around with this sort of thing and then as they get older, they automatically can extrapolate to building like gigantic towers and castles. So how can we take that idea and give it to reinforcement learning? So this is something that I’m particularly excited by.

Amy Zhang: I just wanted to end talking about my sort of wider research agenda. Now that I’m starting as faculty, I have to start recruiting a group. If any of you are interested in doing a PhD at UT Austin or know anybody who is, please send them my way. But when I think about what my research group does, I’m particularly interested in these three applications of reinforcement learning.

Amy Zhang: The first is in robotics, trying to solve manipulation tasks. Going back to that block stacking example, trying to solve locomotion and navigation tasks. How can we build an autonomous driving system purely from first principles, like end to end machine learning? Reinforcement learning has to be a part of that.

Amy Zhang: Natural language processing, so using RL for text generation, being able to extract knowledge from text, when you build an interactive agent, how do you give it information about the world? We learn from textbooks, we don’t want an agent just deployed in the real world with no basic information. Healthcare, how do we build RL agents that can help out with diagnosis and treatment and tackle a lot of the problems that we have there? That’s basically it, very grandiose. I probably won’t make much progress on a lot of these fronts, but this is the dream. And thanks for listening.

Julie Choi: Thank you so much. I think this is very grandiose and amazing that you’re working on it. Amazing. Thank you, Amy, okay.

Julie Choi: We’re going to just clean some of this up. Okay. And we’re going to open up our next talk, which I’m extremely excited about. Let me introduce our next speaker. Our next speaker journeyed probably the furthest to join us tonight… all the way from the east coast, North Carolina, to be here today to deliver this talk. I want to thank you. Thank you.

Julie Choi: Tiffany Williams is a Staff Software Engineer at Atomwise working on AI-powered drug discovery. Prior to Atomwise, Tiffany was a Staff Software Engineer at Project Ronin where she was developing cancer intelligence software. Tiffany earned her PhD in cancer biology from Stanford University and her Bachelor’s in biology from the University of Maryland. Let’s give a warm welcome to Tiffany Williams.

Tiffany Williams: All right. Hello, everyone. I’ll admit, I have some notes here so I can stay on track, but I’m really glad to be here this evening. I was searching through my inbox and realized that I attended my first Girl Geek Dinner in April of 2015. I was fresh out of grad school and a coding boot camp. Eager to form connections, acquired some cool swag, and to be honest, eat some free food and have some drinks.

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Atomwise Staff Software Engineer Tiffany Williams discusses the drug discovery process with AtomNet at MosaicML Girl Geek Dinner. (Watch on YouTube)

Tiffany Williams: I went to grad school to study cancer biology. My research was from the perspective of a molecular biologist exploring the role of a protein as a target for therapy, and skin cancer. And my interests have generally been at that sweet spot, leveraging data, and technology to improve human health. Coming from a biology research background, in my current role as a software engineer at Atomwise, I’m able to look further down that drug discovery process. I’m happy to share with you all today, what that looks like.

Tiffany Williams: Now, I’ll start by giving a very brief primer on the current state of the drug discovery process, as well as a very brief primer on biochemistry. From there, I’ll talk about what we’re doing at Atomwise to make a significant impact in human health, and some interesting challenges ahead of us. I do want to give a disclaimer that I am merely scratching the surface of what could be discussed in drug design, drug development, and even applying ML on top of that. But what I hope you all take away from my time with you all this evening is just general excitement about the possibility of improving human health.

Tiffany Williams: Beyond that, I hope you feel empowered to do even more digging into the drug discovery process, and maybe you’ll feel empowered to even… to find opportunities to make an impact in that space. For me personally, I’m coming from the east coast, but I have a personal attachment to improving the drug discovery process. I’m on the east coast serving as a caregiver now – my mom has endometrial cancer and it’s at a point where there’s only one treatment option. If any of you have ever been in, unfortunately, in a predicament like that, it sucks.

Tiffany Williams: There’s a lot of data out there, technology’s improving, and it would be great if we can leverage that to improve health, right? This diagram depicts the drug discovery process from the basic research to identify a potential drug target all the way to FDA approval. On the right, I’ve noted the average number of years of the different stages in the drug discovery process. In the middle, what it shows are like basically in these different stages, there are certain types of experiments that are done that basically kind of knock out the potential candidates in that step.

Tiffany Williams: Initially you might have like a candidate pool of over like 10,000 drugs, but in an early stage, which is known as like kid identification, computer simulation is used to predict potential drugs ability to bind to a target of interest. These subsequent steps will test for other characteristics like potential toxicity, or efficacy in cell cultures, and animal models. Eventually, hopefully, we end up with a few candidates that reach the human clinical trial phase to verify safety, and any other side effects along with a few other things.

Tiffany Williams: What I hope that you take away from this slide really is that the current basic research to FDA approval drug process takes a really long time. It takes on average, it’s estimated to take about 15 years, and it’s also really expensive for each drug that goes to market, it’s estimated that 2.6 billion is spent.It’s the case that not all of these trials have a happy ending. For every drug that makes it to the market, millions may have been screened, and discarded. We have to improve this process, right? But in order to appreciate how this process can be improved, let me first give that very, very, very brief biochem primer. And I’ll focus specifically on protein interactions.

Tiffany Williams: Up to this point, and then even later in this talk, I’m going to be using some words interchangeably, and I just want to make sure I bring some clarity to what I’m actually talking about. When I say like ligand, or ligand, I’m specifically referring to any molecule that combined to a receiving protein, and that receiving protein is also known as a receptor. And in this presentation, when I use the word or phrase drug candidate, I’m actually referring to that ligand and the receptor would be that the drug target.

Tiffany Williams: One model for how proteins interact is this lock and key model. And the gist of this is that the ligand and the receptor have these somewhat complimentary sites. And the ligand combined to this complimentary site or active site, and basically alter the shape, and or activity of the receptor. And one more thing is that this binding is also referred to as docking. If we know our bodies are made up of proteins, and they have a diversity of functions within the body, but in a disease state, a normal process can become dysregulated. This image on the far right, is taken from a classic cancer biology paper called The Hallmarks of Cancer. The premise of this is that there about 10 biological capabilities that cells take on as they like morph into this more cancerous state. And I’m not going to go over all of these, but I want to highlight that two of these biological capabilities would be like cell growth and like cell motility.

Tiffany Williams: Those are normal functions within the body. But I guess within a diseased state you’ll have overgrowth, or you may have cells that are primarily concentrated in one area, develop the capability to invade into other tissues or metastasize. I say all this to say that like in small molecule drug discovery, what we want to do is actually figure out what sort of structure is needed for a ligand to bind to this problematic protein or proteins, and counteract that like not so great behavior. If this is where Atomwise comes in, right? Or it does, if you don’t know. We want to know how can we efficiently explore this space of all potential chemical compounds to better identify small molecule drugs faster.

Tiffany Williams: Atomwise actually developed AtomNet the first deep convolution neural network for structure based drug design, so that we can actually make better predictions for potential drug candidates earlier in the drug discovery process and faster. I’m highlighting this paper, again, just trying to give high level overviews. Feel free to check this paper out, but what I want you to take away from this is that the AtomNet technology is currently being used in real drug research, in cancer, neurological diseases, various spaces, on the right is, it’s actually a GIF, but since it’s a PDF, it’s not showing up as a GIF, but basically this GIF would show the AtomNet model. It would simulate the AtomNet model, predicting candidate treatments for Ebola. And this prediction that AtomNet made is actually has led to candidate molecules that are now being studied in animal models.

Tiffany Williams: One, despite everything I’ve said up till now, you actually don’t need a background in wet lab research, or chemistry to appreciate what’s happening here. The power of convolute or the power of convolution neural networks, or CNN, is that it allows us to take these complex concepts as a combination of smaller bits of information. And I think if you’re familiar with CNN, or even if you don’t like one area that is really popular, has been computer vision.

Tiffany Williams: I’ll briefly go over like an example of image recognition, and then kind of like try to tie it into how AtomNet works. An image is essentially represented as a 2D grid with three channels, you have red, green, and blue. And this network learns images of objects or faces, for example, by first learning a set of basic features in an image like edges. Then, from there, by combining those edges, the model can then learn to identify different parts of that object. In the case of a face that might be ears, eyes, nose, et cetera. With AtomNet that it’s working in a similar fashion, that receptor ligand pair is represented in a 3D grid, and the channels are essentially the elements that make up protein like carbon oxygen, nitrogen, et cetera. In the case of AtomNet, that the learning of edges is actually the learning of the types of, or predicting the types of bonds between those elements.

Tiffany Williams: Then from there, the compliment to the ear eye detection would be actually identifying more complex molecular bonds. You could say, essentially, that this network is like learning organic chemistry 101. This is powerful because we can then train these models to make predictions about different aspects of the drug discovery process. Like what ligands, or what type of structures are most likely to bind to a certain target? At what strength? What are the additional modifications that we can make to a potential drug candidate to strengthen that bond? Beyond that, it’s not enough just for the ligand to bind to the receptor, it also has to be like biologically relevant in that, let’s say, if we’re looking for something that is treating some neurological disease. We need that ligand to be small enough to cross the blood brain barrier. Or we may need to take into account toxicity or other effects that may happen in the body. Metabolism. We don’t want that small molecule to become quickly metabolized in the body before it has the opportunity to have the intended effect.

Tiffany Williams: These are exciting times, and I’m really, really passionate about the work that we’re doing at Atomwise and any work that is being done at the intersection of health and technology. I wanted to briefly go over some of the projects that my team is currently working on. I work on the drug discovery team at Atomwise, it’s within the engineering team. I think we’re working on some pretty interesting issues. One of my, my teammates Shinji, he recently has been working on bringing best engineering practices, and improving performance of some of our ML tools. Adrian, my teammate, is working on optimizing algorithms to explore a three trillion chemical space. He is also been working on, or has been able to create simulating mocular… mocular, I’m combining words… molecular docking on GPUs.

Tiffany Williams: Then another thing that we’re working on that I actually have more of a hand in, is building a research platform to better enable drug discovery. Oh, I didn’t mention the third person Shabbir, who’s our manager, and he has his hands in a bit of everything. What I hope you take away from this is that I think we’re at an exciting time in today to like really leverage data, and technology to make a major impact in human health. I think there are a lot of challenges, interesting challenges in drug discovery. I hope that you may have been convinced that you actually don’t need a background in chemistry to contribute. There are a lot of transferable skills. If you just know software engineering, or you know ML, or if you’re in product or marketing, there is a place for you in this space.

Tiffany Williams: Finally, really important takeaway is that we are hiring. My team alone, please, if you have any front end experience, if you have backend experience, or if you have a background in computational chemistry, those are some of the positions that are open right now on my team, but then outside of my team, we also are hiring. Definitely check out our careers page. If you have any more questions or are interested in chatting, feel free to reach out to me. I have my LinkedIn handle as well as my Twitter handle, posted here. Then finally, I think I mentioned that I had some references to share. Again, I’m only scratching the surface. There’s so much information out there. I wanted to highlight two Medium articles that were written by former Atom, which is what we call people that work at Atomwise, machine learning for drug discovery, in a nutshell, I highly recommend starting there if you want to do a deeper dive. That’s it.

Julie Choi: Thank you so much, Tiffany. Yes. I think drug discovery is an incredible application domain for deep learning. Really appreciate your talk. Okay, let me introduce our next speaker. Our next speaker is Shelby Heinecke. Shelby is a senior research scientist. Again, I did not touch. Okay.

Julie Choi: Shelby is a Senior Research Scientist at Salesforce Research, developing new AI methods for research and products. Her work spans from theory-driven, robust ML algorithms to practical methods, and toolkits for addressing robustness in applied NLP and recommendation systems. She has a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Master’s as well in Math from Northwestern and her bachelor’s is from MIT. Let’s welcome Shelby.

Shelby Heinecke: Thanks so much. Awesome. I have to give a thank you to Julie for including me in this event, inviting me. This is my first Girl Geek, and not my last Girl Geek event. I’m super excited to be here. Yeah, let me get started.

mosaicml girl geek dinner shelby heinecke speaking recommendation systems salesforce research

Salesforce Research Senior Research Scientist Shelby Heinecke speaks about how to evaluate recommendation system robustness with RGRecSys at MosaicML Girl Geek Dinner. (Watch on YouTube)

Shelby Heinecke: Today I’m going to be talking about evaluating recommendation system robustness, but first I feel kind of like the new kid on the block. Let me just give a little bit of background about myself. I moved here to the Bay Area about a year and a half ago in the middle of the pandemic. Super excited to be here in person to meet people.

Shelby Heinecke: Currently I’m a Senior Research Scientist at Salesforce Research. As Julie mentioned, I work on both research and product. It’s pretty awesome to develop prototypes, and see them in production. Before I was here at Salesforce in the Bay Area, I was doing my PhD in math in Chicago. There, I focused on creating new ML algorithms that were robust. I worked on problems in the space of network resilience. Before that I got my master’s in math, kind of focusing on pure math at Northwestern. Originally I hail from MIT Math, focusing on pure math there. That’s my background. Today’s talk recommendation systems and robustness.

Shelby Heinecke: Let’s get started. A crash course and recommendation systems. So, what is a recommendation system? Well, it consists of models that learn to recommend items based on user interaction histories, user attributes, and or item attributes. Let me give you an example, say we want to build a recommender system that recommends movies to users. Well, what kind of data can we use? We’re going to use the users, previous movies. They viewed we’re going to use the ratings that they rated those movies.

Shelby Heinecke: We’re probably going to take a look at the user’s age. We’re going to look at the user’s location. We’re also going to take into account item attributes. The movie attributes, like the movie title, the movie genre, we’re going to take all that. That’s all of our data, and we’re going to train models. The models can build the recommendation system. As you can imagine, recommendation systems influence our daily lives. We’re all exposed to recommendation systems every day. Just think about purchases. Think about movies.

Shelby Heinecke: Think about songs you’re recommended. Think about the ads that you see every day, people, news, information. We are at the mercy of these recommendation systems and a lot of our decisions are highly influenced by what the recommendation systems decide to show us. Let’s think about the models that we see in recommendation systems. Models can range from simple heuristic approaches, like a rules based approach or co-sign similarity approach to complex deep learning approaches, think neural collaborative filtering, or even now we’re seeing transformer based approaches coming to light.

Shelby Heinecke: With the vast range of models available and how greatly they impact our daily lives, understanding the vulnerabilities of these models of each of these types of models is super critical. Let me get started about recommendation model robustness. As we all know, machine learning models are trained on data, and ultimately deployed to production. And in that process, there are some hidden sources of vulnerabilities that I want to bring to light.

Shelby Heinecke: One of the big issues is that training data may not reflect the real world data. In many cases, we’re training on data that’s been highly curated. That’s been cleaned up. And yeah, and so because of that, when we train a model on that very clean, highly curated data, it’s not going to necessarily perform well when it’s exposed to the messy data of the real world. Real world data has noise. Real world data is just can be unpredictable. As a result, sometimes we train model, we train a recommendation model, but we see poor performance and production. That’s definitely one type of vulnerability we need to watch out for.

Audience Member: Woo! So true.

Shelby Heinecke: What? Okay. Another type of vulnerability. I love the enthusiasm, okay? Another type of vulnerability. As you can imagine, recommendation systems are closely tied to revenue for a lot of different parties for companies, for sellers. There’s an issue that participants may intentionally manipulate the model. Think about creating fake accounts, trying to do things, to get your item higher on the list for customers, things like that. That is a reality and that’s something we have to take into account.

Shelby Heinecke: The last thing I want to bring to light is poor performance on subpopulations. This is a well known issue across all of ML, but I just wanted to bring it to light, to recommendation too, that when we train models and we test on the evaluation set, usually the basic evaluation methods think precision recall F1. We’re computing that on the entire test set, so we’re averaging overall users. And in that average, sometimes we’re hiding…

Shelby Heinecke: Sometimes there’s poor performance on subpopulations that are hidden. For example, a subpopulation that you may care about could be new users, or maybe a users of a certain gender. That’s something that we just need to keep an eye on. We don’t want poor performance on key subpopulations I’ve told you about all these different types of vulnerability.

Shelby Heinecke: What is a robust model? Well, a robust model you can think of it intuitively as a model that will retain great performance in light of all of these potential perturbations, or in light of all of these scenarios. The question is how can we assess the robustness of models? That is where one of our contributions comes in.

Shelby Heinecke: I want to introduce one of our open source repos called RGRecSys, and it stands for robustness gym for recommendation systems. Our library kind of automates stress testing for recommendation models. By stress testing, I mean, you can pick a model, you can pick a data set, and you can stress test it in the sense that you can manipulate the data set.

Shelby Heinecke: You can add in attacks, you can add in noise and so on. I’ll actually go into more detail about that. And you can see in a really simple way how your model, the robustness of your model. As I mentioned, RGRecSys, is a software, is a software toolkit. It’s on GitHub. I’ll talk about that in a second and it’s going to help you assess the robustness of your models.

Shelby Heinecke: One thing that we contribute is that RGRecSys provides a holistic evaluation of recommendation models across five dimensions of robustness. When I say I told you about various types of vulnerabilities, there’s various types of robustness. Our library helps you to quickly and easily test all these different types of robustness for your model. Using our API, you just simply select a model for testing, and then you specify the robustness test that you’re interested in trying along with the robustness test parameters. What I’ll do is I’ll go over the types of tests that are in the library.

Shelby Heinecke: Let’s talk about the different tests that we have in our library. First is around subpopulations and this kind of goes back to what I mentioned in the previous slides. This will allow you the test. What is the model performance on subgroup A versus subgroup B? And this is going to be very useful because, as I mentioned, most of the time, we’re just computing precision recall these usual metrics on the test set, but this gives you an easy way to test performance on specific subgroups. This could be useful, for example, if you want to test you want to test performance on gender A versus gender B, or new users versus old versus like users that have been in the system for longer time. Just some examples there. That is one type of test you can run in our library. The second type of test is around sparsity. If you think about recommendation systems and you think about the items available like a movie recommender, or a purchasing recommender there’s millions of items, and each user really only interacts with a handful of those items.

Shelby Heinecke: Each user is only clicking, only purchasing, only viewing a handful. This is a source of data sparsity. Data sparsity is a huge problem in recommendation systems. It will be good to test the degree to which your model is sensitive to sparse data. That’s one thing you can test with our library. The third test is around transformations. There are a lot of ways that data can be perturbed when you’re training a recommendation system model. For example, maybe you’re gathering data about your users and maybe that data is erroneous in some ways. And because of that, you might want to test if a recommendation model will be robust, if user features, for example, are perturbed. The fourth test that you can test is around attacks. As I mentioned, there’s a lot of reasons why people would try to attack a recommendation system it’s tied to revenue ultimately.

Shelby Heinecke: What you can do with our library is implement some attacks and test how your model performance would change under those manipulations. And finally distribution shift. What we see is that the training data that you train on is often different from the data that you’ll see in production. It’s super important to be able to know, get a sense of how was my model going to perform if it’s exposed to data from a slightly different distribution? You can go ahead and test that with our library., I definitely encourage you to check out our library on GitHub, and feel free to check out the paper for way more details about the capabilities. And with that, thank you so much for listening. It was great to share it. Feel free to reach out.

Julie Choi: Thank you, Shelby. That was great. It’s very important to be robust when we’re doing model deployment. Okay. Angela Jiang, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

Julie Choi: Angela is currently on the product team at OpenAI. Previously, she was a product manager at Determined AI building, deep learning training, software and hardware, deep learning… I think Determined AI was recently acquired by HPE. And Angela graduated with a PhD in machine learning systems from the CS department at Carnegie Mellon University. And we actually have built some of our own speed up methods on your research. It’s an honor to have you here today.

Angela Jiang: Thank you so much, Julie, for inviting me, for the introduction, as well as Sarah, and Angie for organizing the event and bringing us all together too. Yeah. Like Julie mentioned, I’m Angela. I work on the product team at OpenAI.

mosaicml girl geek dinner angela jiang openai

OpenAI Product Manager Angela Jiang speaks about turning generative models from research into products at MosaicML Girl Geek Dinner. (Watch on YouTube)

Angela Jiang: I work on our Applied team where we really focus on essentially bringing all of the awesome research coming out of the org and turning them into products that are hopefully useful, safe, and easy to use.

Angela Jiang: Most of my day, I’m thinking about how to turn generative models from research into products. I thought I’d make the talk about that as well. This might as well be a list of things that keep me up at night, think about it that way. But in particular, what I really wanted to highlight is just some of the observations I’ve had about things that make these generative models unique and tend to have large implications on how we actually deploy them into the market.

Angela Jiang: To start, I want to share a little bit about what OpenAI’s products are. OpenAI does a lot of AI research. In particular, we do a lot of generative models. Over the last two years, we’ve really started to work to bring those generative models into real products. Three examples here are GPT-3, that does text generation; Codex, that does code generation; and most recently, DALL-E, which does image generation. These were all made by DALL-E.

Angela Jiang: To get a little bit more concrete, what these products are is that we expose these models like GPT-3 and Codex via our APIs. As a user, you can go to the OpenAI website, sign up, and then hit these endpoints and start using these models. And here’s an example of how you might use the GPT-3 model. Here we have an example of your input in the gray box. It might say something like, “Convert my shorthand into a firsthand account of the meeting and have some meeting notes.” And you submit this to the model, and then the model will do its very best to return you an output that completes this text. And in this case, the response is essentially a summarization of your notes.

Angela Jiang: Codex works very similarly, except it’s also specialized for code. And in this case, our input is not only text, but it’s also some code, some JavaScript code, and some hints that we want to transform it into Python. And the output is some Python code that does that. DALL-E is very, very new. It’s been out for around a month, so it’s not available in the API or anything yet. But it has a very similar interaction mode where you have, again, an input, which is a description of the image that you want. And then as the output, it provides some images that relate to that description, which in this case is a cute tropical fish.

Angela Jiang: I think GPT-3, Codex, and DALL-E are all really good examples of taking research and seeing that there’s a really big market need for the kinds of capabilities that they expose. Then working as an Applied team to actually transform that research into a productionized product by essentially figuring out where that user value is, designing the product so that we can deliver that user value in a way where users are set up for success, making sure it’s deployed responsibly, et cetera, et cetera.

Angela Jiang: To date, there’s hundreds of applications that have been submitted for production review that is built upon this API. Those are applications like writing assistants like CopyAI if you’ve heard of that, coding assistants like GitHub’s Copilot is built on top of Codex, as well as a lot of other applications like chatbots for video games, question answering bots, etc. This is pretty good validation that these models are not only really exciting research, but are also solving problems in the market.

Angela Jiang: Now, when we think about bringing these to market and turning them into real products, I think there are two interesting properties of these generative models that really change who uses them as well as how we actually deploy them. I’ll talk about how these models are stochastic and how they’re very general. With typical products, you might expect that the results are very predictable and deterministic. For instance, if you’re coding up a payments API, every time you use that payments API, you’d expect it to react in a similar way. This is not how our models work at all.

Angela Jiang: Our models are probabilistic. Every time you submit a prompt, you could get a different response back. If you tweak that prompt ever slightly, then you could get a very different response back. That really changes how you interact with a product and what kind of applications can be built on top of it. Another difference is I think that typical software products that I think about are typically focused on solving a need or a problem very directly, whereas, in these generative models, they’re very, very general. They’re capable of doing a lot of things all simultaneously.

Angela Jiang: For instance, you would think that GPT-3 would be able to summarize legal texts and also simultaneously write poems or maybe even code. I think this is super exciting from a science perspective as we get more and more powerful models, closer and closer to something that’s super general. But from a product perspective, this comes with some challenges because we have to now take one model and one product and have it serve many, many use cases simultaneously.

Angela Jiang: For the rest of this talk, I’ll talk about, again, more detail about how these two properties affect the way that we deploy our products, and I’ll give some examples of each. Okay, starting with stochasticity. Right. Our models, again, are probabilistic, which means that every time you use it, you might get a different result. The result might not be what you want or maybe the result is what you want every third time you try the model.

Angela Jiang: It might be surprising that you can actually build real applications on top of this kind of behavior. What we actually find is that for a lot of tasks, especially very simple tasks, we can have very concrete and reproducible behavior for even tasks where the outputs are imperfect or are only correct some of the time, these results are actually still very useful for many applications in the right context.

Angela Jiang: We find that these models work really well, for instance, in creating productivity tools where there’s a human in the loop. A really good example of this is Codex Copilot. Some of you may have used it before, but this is a screenshot of it in action, where it’s a Visual Studio Code extension and it just gives you auto-complete code suggestions that the user can then tab to accept or reject.

Angela Jiang: This is great for a product like Codex because you have actually an expert there that’s telling you, is this completion good or not? And generating more. What we actually see is that most of the suggestions from Copilot are rejected by the user, but still, developers tell us that this is an integral part of their deployment pipeline or their development pipeline I should say. It does not need to be perfect every time we generate something. Those are cases where you don’t need a perfect result every time. What you’re looking for is just inspiration or getting over writer’s block. In some of the applications built on top of these APIs, you actually don’t have a correct answer to shoot for.

Angela Jiang: Applications that are doing art or creative tasks or entertainment, that’s a case where having variety really is helpful actually. Here I have a DALL-E prompt, which is a bright oil painting of a robot painting a flower. And here are different generations from DALL-E. And in this case, it’s really helpful actually to have probabilistic nature because, for one, I want to have different options. And it’s also really cool to have generations that you’ve never seen before or other people haven’t seen before.

Angela Jiang: I think it’s even counterintuitive that, in this case, we’ve actually learned that these AI systems seem to be doing really, really well and surprising us in creative tasks as opposed to rote tasks, which you might have expected the opposite earlier. Those are some examples where the properties of these generative models affect what applications are built on top, but it also affects how we deploy these models. Going into a little bit more detail, one property is that these products are really, really hard to evaluate.

Angela Jiang: This makes being a Product Manager, among other things, quite challenging because we really need to know how our products perform so we can position them in the correct way to the users, know what to deploy, and tell users how to use them correctly. For example, we have these text models, GPT-3, and they have different capabilities, right? One capability is they might be able to complete text, and another capability is they might be able to edit existing text. There’s some overlap there on which one you should use.

Angela Jiang: It’s really important that we understand exactly how this model performs on different tasks so that we can direct users to use the right tool at the right time. We try really hard to figure out creative ways to evaluate these at scale, given that we often need a human in the loop to be telling us if a generation is good or not.

Angela Jiang: We do things like large-scale application-specific A/B testing. Like we see if we use one model or the other, then which model gets more engagement for this writing assistant.

Angela Jiang: Next, I’ll just give a couple of examples of how generality also comes into the picture here. Like I mentioned, these models are capable of a lot of things simultaneously because the way that they’re trained is that they’re trained for a very long time, for months, on a lot of data. And the data spans the internet, books, code, so many different things.

Angela Jiang: By the time we get this model as the Applied team, we’re really still not sure what kind of capabilities it’s picked up at that time. But like I mentioned, it’s really important that we understand that quickly. This is also really exciting because, at any given time, we can always discover a new capability of the model, and it’s often discovered after training.

Angela Jiang: An example of this is that the original GPT-3 model was built with text for text. And it was really a discovery after the fact that it also happened to be kind of good at code as well. And these signs of life and discovery is what ultimately sparked this idea of a Codex series that specialized in code.

Angela Jiang: As a Product Manager, it’s really critical that we keep on discovering and probing these models to really understand what’s the frontier of what they can do. And again, we are still figuring out what is the best way to go about this. But something counterintuitive that I realized after I started is that traditional user research that we’re used to doesn’t actually work really well for this use case because you might expect that you would go to your users and ask, how is this model? What can you do with it?

Angela Jiang: What we find is that our users, by definition, are working on tasks that the model was already really capable at. Their focus is not on the new capabilities of the model and pushing that frontier oftentimes. What’s worked better for us is working with creatives or domain experts to really hack and probe at the model and see what the limits of it are.

Angela Jiang: That’s the exciting part of generality, that there’s always a new capability around the corner to discover. But there’s also some risk to it because there’s not only all these capabilities in the model, but the model can also generate things that are not useful for you, and it can also generate things that you really don’t want to generate.

Angela Jiang: For instance, GPT-3, when prompted in the right way, can generate things like hate speech, spam, violence, things you don’t want your users to be generating. This is also a big part of our goals as a research and applied organization is to figure out how to deploy these models in a way that doesn’t have toxicity in them.

Angela Jiang: There’s a lot of different approaches for doing this, spanning from policy research to product mitigations to research mitigations, but I’ll highlight two things here. One thing that’s worked really well for us is actually fine-tuning these models after the fact with a human in the loop, telling you exactly what kind of content is good content.

Angela Jiang: What we found by doing this is that we have a much better time at having the model follow the user’s intentions. And we have a much less toxic and more truthful model as a result of it. At this point, every time we deploy a model, we also fine-tune the language model in this way. We also do a lot of research and provide free tooling to help the users understand what the models are generating at scale so they can understand if there’s anything that they need to intervene in.

Angela Jiang: Okay. Finally, even though I think it’s very, very cool that these models can do a lot of different things at once, sometimes it really just can’t serve multiple use cases simultaneously well. Different use cases often will just require, for instance, different ways of completion.A chatbot for children is going to want a very different personality than a chatbot for support.

Angela Jiang: You also just have different product requirements in terms of accuracy or latency or even price. Copilot is a really good example of something that needs an interactive latency so that it can continue to be useful in real time. But contrast that with something like SQL query generation, which doesn’t need a fast latency, but actually just wants the most accurate response that you can give it. What we’ve found is that the combination of two things have allowed us to provide this flexibility to serve the use cases that we need to serve.

Angela Jiang: One is that we don’t just expose the best model that we have or the most accurate model we have I should say, we expose models with different capability and latency trade-offs for the users to choose from. And then we also offer fine-tuning as a first-class product so that you can take a model and then fine-tune it so that it has your personalized tone or your personalized data bank.

Angela Jiang: These are, hopefully, examples that give you a flavor of what it’s like to deploy generative models. This is also just the tip of the iceberg. If any of this stuff is interesting, please feel free to come and chat with me. I should also mention that we are hiring. We are. Thank you so much.

Julie Choi: Thank you so much, Angela. After DALL-E was launched, the productivity went a little down. We were so distracted by the DALL-E. I don’t know whether to thank or curse your team for that.

Julie Choi: Thank you, Banu. It is just a joy to introduce our next speaker. She’s a friend of mine and a former colleague, really an all-star. It’s so wonderful to have you here, Banu. Thank you.

Julie Choi: Banu Nagasundaram is a machine learning product leader at Amazon Web Services where she owns the go-to-market strategy and execution for AWS Panorama, an edge computer vision appliance and service. Prior to AWS, Banu has spent over a decade in technology, building AI and high-performance computing products for data centers and low-power processors for mobile computing. Banu holds a Master’s in EECS from the University of Florida and an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Let’s all welcome Banu.

Banu Nagasundaram: Thank you, Julie and team for having me here. I’m super excited to be here. One difference from the other speakers is this is not my area of expertise, the title of the talk. It is something I’m trying to do better at that I wanted to share with you.

mosaicml girl geek dinner banu nagasundaram speaking aws

AWS Product Manager Banu Nagasundaram speaks about seeking the bigger picture as a ML product leader at MosaicML Girl Geek Dinner. (Watch on YouTube)

Banu Nagasundaram: I’m trying to seek the bigger picture at work. I’m a Product Manager and I’m trying to see why companies do what they do and learn more in that process. What I want you to take away from this is how you can also seek the big picture in your roles that you do either as engineering or product leaders.

Banu Nagasundaram: With that, I wanted to share a little bit about the companies that I work with on a daily basis. These are concerns who use machine learning and AI and work with AWS to implement the services in production. This is different from the research that we spoke about.

Banu Nagasundaram: These companies are looking at getting value out of these systems that they put in place, of course, based on the research, but taking into production. What I implore you to think about is put on a hat of a CTO or a CIO in each of these companies and think about how and why you would make the investment decisions in machine learning and AI.

Banu Nagasundaram: For example, I work with healthcare and life sciences team. I learned a lot from the drug discovery talk earlier from Tiffany here, but I do work with healthcare and life sciences team to understand how they can take the vast amounts of health data that they have to translate into patient information that they can use to serve patients better.

Banu Nagasundaram: They use multiple services to personalize, to extract value from the text data, a lot of unstructured data that they have. That’s one category of customers.

Banu Nagasundaram: The second type of customers that I work with include industrial and manufacturing. The key component that they’re trying to improve is productivity and also optimizing their manufacturing throughput.

Banu Nagasundaram: The questions that they ask and they seek to improve include automating visual inspection. How can I improve the product quality across my manufacturing sites? I have thousands of sites in the US. I scale globally. How can I implement this process not only in one site but uniformly across those thousands of sites to achieve something like predictive maintenance on the tools, improve uptime of their equipment, etc?

Banu Nagasundaram: Third set of customers we work with include financial services. They are looking at data to improve or reduce the risk in the decisions that they make. They’re trying to target customer segments better so they can understand underserved populations but lower the risk in making those products and offerings that they want to do.

Banu Nagasundaram: They also look into fraud detection and many applications around financial services. Retail, this is one I work closely with because I work in the computer vision team right now. And retail is trying to use the insights from computer vision products to see how they can reduce stockouts, which is basically when you go to the store, is the product available? Can they sell it to you? How can they manage inventory? Can they keep track of the count or the number of people entering the store?

Banu Nagasundaram: You may have heard about Amazon Go, for example, a store with just a walkout experience. A lot of retail companies are working with us to understand how they can use computer vision to build experiences like that.

Banu Nagasundaram: And it doesn’t stop at a retail store. Think about the operations officer, a centralized person who’s sitting and trying to analyze which region should I invest more on? Which region should I improve security? Should it be in North Carolina? Should it be in California? Or should it be in a whole different country? They’re trying to collect and gather insights across their stores regionally, nationally, internationally to make those decisions.

Banu Nagasundaram: Then there’s media and entertainment too, which we touched upon a little bit around recommendation systems and personalization. Here we work with customers who are looking to improve monetization, who are looking to create differentiation in the marketplace, in the very highly competitive media and content marketplace, through those recommendation systems and personalization that they have.

Banu Nagasundaram: Across all of these customers, the core task as a product manager that I work on is understanding their requirements and then translating it into product features so that they are served better. But what I learned in the process is that it’s so much more in decision-making than just understanding about features or product requirements.

Banu Nagasundaram: It’s about what enables these CTOs to make those decisions is value creation. How can they use all of these AI ML systems to realize value from the systems that they put in place? One simple way to think about what value creation is, is that it’s an aggregation of data, analytics, and IT that brings the machine learning together. But there’s a second part to it, which includes people and processes.

Banu Nagasundaram: What I mean by that is all of this analytics and machine learning and data can help them understand something, but they still have to lean on people to analyze the data that they gather, make improvements in the process in order to recognize and create value. And that’s the workflow for decision-making across all of these companies.

Banu Nagasundaram: We can look at this as two buckets, one in data analytics and IT, and the second one as people and processes. For the computer vision product that I own, I wanted to talk to you about the value chain for the first part, which is the data analytics and IT portion.

Banu Nagasundaram: This might look a complex set of boxes. It is. Once I finish the pitch here, if this excites you, I’m hiring too, growing my team. Hopefully, I do a good job in explaining this value chain.

Banu Nagasundaram: I started my career in the bottom left, by the way, in silicon processor design. Pretty much in the bottom row, trying to understand how silicon design is then aggregated into components and how distributors sell those components to OEMs who are equipment manufacturers, and how from those equipment manufacturers, the equipments reach the consumers, which is through those equipment distributors.

Banu Nagasundaram: My product is currently both an appliance and a service. I do start from the silicon side, working with partners, I can give examples like Nvidia on the silicon side, Lenovo on the OEM side. And then once you have these equipment distributors selling these devices or equipment I should say to infrastructure providers, one of the examples of infrastructure providers is cloud service providers, but it can also be on-prem equipment providers.

Banu Nagasundaram: You then go to the infrastructure providers, which is the second row from the bottom, and these infrastructure providers then build the tools and frameworks either themselves or through the partner ecosystem. Those tools and frameworks essentially put in place to make efficient use of that underlying infrastructure. It’s a motivation for these infrastructure providers to offer the best tool and frameworks so that you can gain that value out of that underlying infrastructure.

Banu Nagasundaram: Then comes the ML services. You have the overall MLOps flow is what would fit in this bucket. Once you have the tools and the frameworks, how can all of these pieces get grouped together to build a robust system that can scale in production? This goes from data annotation, labeling, training to predictions, to model monitoring. “How can you maintain this when it is in production” is a key question for these decision-makers.

Banu Nagasundaram: Then comes the AI services that are built on top of these ML services. AI services can either be services offered by CSPs or it can be services offered by startups or companies who are trying to build the microservices or services on a specific use case. This is where the customer use case comes into play, where you have that specific use case. In case of computer vision, you can think of services like Rekognition or Lookout for Vision. Those are two examples that AWS offers for computer vision services.

Banu Nagasundaram: Then comes the final layer. This is the layer that the customers that I refer to, the CTOs, work closely with. The independent software vendors or ISVs are companies that build these software solutions, aggregating everything that I spoke to you about, but building the software components of it. But the software component by itself is not going to function in a customer’s premise. For the customer to realize value, the solution, the software solution for their use case has to integrate with their existing system. That’s where system integrators come into play.

Banu Nagasundaram: For example, Deloitte. You can think of Deloitte, Accenture, et cetera are system integrators who bring this whole puzzle together for customers, build that reference architecture for that solution. And they’re like, okay, so now we have this architecture in place. Then they bring in the value-added resellers, who are companies like Convergent or Stanley, for example, who take this entire system that’s put in place and roll it into individual sites.

Banu Nagasundaram: This is where it reaches the scale of thousands of sites. Once a solution is put together, proven in a pilot or a production pilot or a proof of concept, when you go to production, across globally, across cities, across countries, the value-added resellers roll the system into place in the customer’s site. But it doesn’t end there. There need to be managed service providers who can offer service contracts to maintain the system in place once it is on a customer’s premise.

Banu Nagasundaram: All of these building blocks in the value chain is what makes ML, machine learning, in production, intangible for a customer to realize value. It is a big journey. And this is the team I’m building who will work with individual partners across this value chain. And if this is something that excites you, we can talk after. In that value chain, we started with value creation. What is it that companies are looking for? We saw the value chain, but the value realization, let’s say the companies went through this process, put this whole system in place.

Banu Nagasundaram: What is it that actually helps them realize that value? When we think about data analytics in IT, many of the ML practitioners that I talk to, talk to me about the output, the visualization, the dashboards, the histograms for decision making, but it doesn’t stop there. That is not sufficient for these companies. There has to be people in those companies who take this output and actually work to achieve an outcome. The outcome is increase in productivity, increasing in throughput. It’s like, if I can know my demand better as a retail store, or if I can forecast the demand better, I can do so much better in my business.

Banu Nagasundaram: That is an outcome that I’m looking for from this data output that I’m getting from the machine learning models. But is that outcome sufficient? No, the outcome is like one place, one time, you are able to visualize that outcome, but you have to scale that outcome globally in order to achieve the impact. The impact that businesses look for is that you have to either increase revenue, reduce costs, reduce their risk, improve their sustainability, or create a competitive advantage. This is what the ML journey in production looks like. While I walked you through incrementally from the beginning on what it would take customers to get there, customers don’t work through individual steps, reach there and see what’s the next step.

Banu Nagasundaram: They actually have to make assumptions along the way and then understand what the impact might be and this is an AWS term that I’m going to throw and work backwards, which is understand what is it that you want and then build out what is it that you can, what you need to do towards achieving that end goal. That’s the big picture that I want to leave you with. In this whole ecosystem of having machine learning in production, can you think big on behalf of the customer, can you seek the big picture that the customer is looking for? If you’re working on a feature, what is the end state of that feature? What is the end state of that business? Who is actually your end customer? Your end customer may not be the team that you’re immediately working with and who is the decision maker for that overall flow?

Banu Nagasundaram: One of the simple frameworks, this might sound silly. It’s super simple, is to ask five whys, which is in a customer discovery or any feature that you’re building. Just ask, why is that outcome important? Why is that output important? How is it going to help? Why is it going to be something that helps the customer? Why is it needed tomorrow? All of these questions is just going to help drive a little bit more clarity into the bigger picture and motivations for the customer on how they make investment decisions and choices in your particular products and features that you’re building. And that’s it. I want to leave you with one fair warning. If you try that five why’s with your partner, that’s on your own.

Julie Choi: All right. Thank you. Banu, that was great. Thank you so much. It is my honor to introduce Lamya Alaoui, a dear friend of mine and I’m so thankful to you, Lamya, for agreeing to give the closing talk of the night. Lamya is currently Chief People Officer at Hala Systems, and she has been committed throughout her career to supporting organizations as they shift behaviors to align their talent strategies with their business objectives. Her corporate background includes over 15 years of experience in talent acquisition and management, where she has had the opportunity to build teams for companies such as Bertelsmann, Orange, Groupon, Google and Microsoft. Her work experiences span North America, Europe, Asia, Middle East, and North Africa. Let us welcome Lamya Alaoui.

mosaicml girl geek dinner lamya alaoui speaking hala systems

Hala Systems Director of People Ops Lamya Alaoui talks about 10 lessons learned from building high performance diverse teams at MosaicML Girl Geek Dinner. (Watch on YouTube)

Lamya Alaoui: Thank you so much, Julie. Hi everyone. Thank you. I don’t see Sarah here, but I want to thank her personally because she has been so patient and Angie as well for inviting me here. How is everyone feeling today? This is the non-tech talk. This is the people talk. A quick background before we get into it. At Hala System we develop early warning systems in war zones. Not the type of things that you broadcast usually when you are in this type of settings, but we’re hiring as well, especially for our AI team. And Julie announced my promotion that no one else knows about, even in the company so, thank you. That stays here, please, in this room, until next all hands, on Wednesday. With that being said, a little bit of background about me. I’m Moroccan.

Lamya Alaoui: I moved to the US about 10 years ago. I will ask a lot of grace because my brain is wired in French. Sometimes there will be French words that will come out from my mouth so please be graceful about it if you can. With that being said, this is one of my favorite things because as a Moroccan who’s half Muslim, half Jewish, went to Catholic school, I thought I got it covered, but I was the lady the first time I landed in Germany because I was not aware that you’re not supposed to kiss people to greet them. But this is one of my favorite pictures to show and talks or even in workshops, because I’m pretty sure it happened to all of us one way or another. We show up and we think that we got it right. It’s what we’re familiar with and actually it’s not what the other person is expected.

Lamya Alaoui: Throughout my career, I have built teams in very, very different countries, different cultures. At Hala we have over 17 nationalities. Altogether we speak 25 languages. It makes it interesting for the meetings, believe me, where you have side conversational Slack in a whole different language, but you still need to deliver officially in English. The translation is super weird sometimes, but those are anecdotes for another time. That leads me to one of the lessons that I learned very early on. It seems obvious that when you’re building teams and you want them to perform, one might assume you want to know your mission and your values, but it doesn’t happen as often as one might think. The mission is basically your GPS. You want people to rally behind a common goal.

Lamya Alaoui: You want them to believe in that and it’s also what’s in it for them when they’re working for a mission. That means that it needs to be aligned with their own values or their belief system. SVlues start very early on. We all have seen or worked for companies where the values are stated. How many of you when you joined the company saw values listed on the website or have been talked to? How many of you were explained to what are the associated behaviors and expectations when it comes to those values? Oh, we have less people. This is one of the first lessons that I always recommend to people to kind of follow. I learned the hard way, by the way, is that know your mission, state your values. Values should come from the leadership of course, but also account for it in the hiring process, which we will get a little bit into it, but be very clear about what are your expectations are when it comes to values.

Lamya Alaoui: If I’m thinking about transparency, for me, it means having information that I need to do my job, but some other people, they think that they need transparency. They need to have access to everything. We all have someone like that in our companies. Don’t we? Setting those clear expectations and associated behaviors are very important. And mission is like literally your North Star. This is why it’s really important. The second one is seek first to understand. This is from Stephen Covey. There is a second part to it which is, then to be understood. When you are building diverse teams, we all come from different backgrounds, we have different understandings, often we speak different languages. We can also come from different cultures, high context or low context and if we don’t have mutual understanding we cannot succeed because then everyone is convinced that they’re right, that their approach is again the one that everyone needs to follow, but that kind of hinders teamwork, which is actually essential to high performing teams.

Lamya Alaoui: Listen. We all think that we listen pretty well, but we actually don’t because as human beings we have been trained, for the last few centuries, to listen to answer. We’re almost never listening for the sake of just listening and there is amazing research about that, that I will be more than glad to share. In working in very diverse teams or diverse teams in general, listen, help, create understanding, respect, which is a very important when it comes to having high performance teams as well. How many of you would say that they listen really, really, really well. Okay. We have four people in the whole room. That gives you something to think about. That’s another, and I’m a good listener, but still a lot of work to do with that.

Lamya Alaoui: Acknowledge that you will face cultural differences. When you join a new team, we all want to get along. Again, its human nature. We want to belong somewhere. We’re super excited. It’s a new job. We just went through the hiring process. We landed the job and then you show up in that meeting or you’re meeting your team and sometimes you see people that you have nothing in common with, and you still try to ignore that, which is again, human nature. Beautiful thing. Just as a manager, as a team member, be prepared that yes, we will have some challenges. We’re not seeing things the same way. One of the best examples that I always give here is like, I’m from what would qualify as a high context culture, which is there is no explicit direct messaging.

Lamya Alaoui: Basically I can be in my office and say, hey, I have a lot of work and I’m hungry. My expectation is that my coworker will just get it and go get me some food. Now, imagine if I’m having someone from a low context culture. In their head, they’re like, I mean, you’re going to go get your food when you’re done. That creates a fracture that it’s not even intentional because there will be resentment from my end. Why didn’t he get it? Having those conversations upfront is quite helpful because then people know again, what to expect. Assess the degree of interactions. When teams are being built, most of the time what happens is no one is thinking about how often the team members will have to work together, at what intensity.

Lamya Alaoui: Before starting to build the teams or adding members to your teams, just make sure that, hey, how often do they have to have, I don’t know, sprints. If it’s once a month, eh, you might want to have people that are pretty much aligned having somehow the same thought process and we’ll get to that in a little bit. If they’re not interacting a lot, you have a lot more room to assemble your team. Always, there are three degrees of interactions. We have low interdependency, which is people are doing their things on their own and sometimes it’s like going in a [inaudible]. Medium, which is a hybrid and then high interdependency, which the output from someone becomes the input for someone else.

Lamya Alaoui: Therefore, things need to be structured in a very certain way in making sure that people get along and understand, again, what’s expected from them. Communicate, communicate, and communicate and when you think you are done, communicate some more. One of the things about communication is that we all think that it happened. Again, the question, oh, disclosure, I ask a lot of questions. I mean, I used to be a recruiter. It comes with the territory basically. How many of you thought in a meeting that you were crystal clear and then two days later you discover that you were not.

Lamya Alaoui: When it comes to communication in teams, again, thank you, Slack, everyone in meetings, or usually where everyone is doing a lot of things at the same time. You’re talking, you think that you got your point across. Always ask a question at the end. What do you think? What are your takeaways? Just to make sure that people are on the same page and teams, high performing one’s, one of the best practices is having action items assigned, even if it’s an informal meeting or if a conversation happened on Slack, on, I don’t know, any other platforms. Even sometimes now, oh, we have also Asana now people add us to Asana and they think that, hey, we’re good.

Lamya Alaoui: No, make sure that the person actually went in, is understanding what you’re waiting for or expecting. Diversity and leadership. Clearly icons still have a long way to go in terms of diversity, but again, high performance teams when it comes to diversity need to see that diversity reflected in the leadership and in the management. Research shows that usually entry level management, there are sometimes good numbers, but as soon as we go to director, VP and above underrepresented groups tend to become less visible or they’re non-existent and C-suites and VP, EVP, SVP type of roles.

Lamya Alaoui: It’s also very important that the leadership reflects the diversity that the company is striving for. Again, an obvious one, hire the right people. This one is very dear to my heart because as I said, I’m a recruiter. Again, we’re only humans. We tend to hire people who are like us, who think like us, who share our values. Anyone wants to venture what happens when you hire people who are like you and your team and you’re building a team of clones, basically from a cognitive perspective. Anyone? Yes.

Shika: You wouldn’t get to learn something different from what you already know.

Lamya Alaoui: Yes. Anyone? Thank you so much. What’s your name?

Shika: Shika.

Lamya Alaoui: Shika. Thank you, Shika for volunteering. When you build a team of clones and this is a tech talk after all, how do you think that you can innovate? How do you think you can perform if everyone is thinking the same way and not challenging the ideas that are being discussed? Chances are very, very, very slim.

Lamya Alaoui: When you’re hiring the right people for your teams you have to look at three things. The first one is the values, because that’s, again, what will be the foundation of the team that you’re building. The second one is what’s missing from your team. An ideal team has five type of people. You have a theorist, you have a strategist, you have someone who is an analyst, you have a manager and you have an implementer. When we hire our teams usually we hire in desperation because you know, you got to deliver on that project.

Lamya Alaoui: No one is thinking about the composition of the team in itself. In tech, my experience showed we have a lot of theorists and strategists and a lot of analysts, sometimes zero implementer and zero managers. Things don’t get done somehow. Always look at what’s missing and finally, the third part is people who are willing to learn, who have a curious mindset and are eager to grow, because this is how actually innovation happens. People who are not afraid basically of questioning the status quo.

Lamya Alaoui: The other lesson is constantly scan for misunderstandings and ways to clarify. Again, here I will go to the low context, high context type of thing so, let me give you an example. I think it might be easier to make my point that way and I will ask a question at the end. In high context cultures or in some cultures when you ask questions, no, is not an acceptable answer. You have to say yes and some others you have to say no three times before saying yes.

Lamya Alaoui: Imagine when you have people from different cultures in the same room and someone is asking a close question that requires a yes or a no. What are the chances, based on what I said, that you will get an accurate answer to your question? 50%, 60%, 20%, a hundred percent. For this always ask open ended questions to give people space to answer without having to break their own boundaries and to make sure that you are getting clarity in the answers. How many of you were in meetings where you felt that you were misunderstood when you were speaking? What did you do? Anyone wants to volunteer again? When you felt that you were misunderstood? Yes.

Angela: Have you summarized in a written notification? I gave action items to the people I wanted clarification from that helped with the misunderstandings.

Lamya Alaoui: Thank you, Angela. One of the things that is really helpful and again, best practice for high performing teams, always summarize and put things in writing and this setting English is the working language. We do have a lot of people, I know in my team, I have a lot of non-native speakers. I’m not a native speaker so to make sure that the message gets across and that it’s clear it’s always in writing, always, which we tend not to do because everyone is working long hours or you have back to back meetings. Then at the end of the day you just want to finally get to do your work and you never summarize in writing what happened in those meetings.

Lamya Alaoui: Finally, the structure. Build a structure that is around diverse teams. When we’re usually building teams we have, we’re looking at what now is referred to as visible diversity, which can be ethnicity, religion, gender and many other things, but we’re never looking at the cognitive one that also has a heavy part, especially in tech. Those are recommendation that I’ve always lived by every time that I join a new company. We do a reintroduction and relaunch of the core values. We redefine them. We create, and this is like a company work, it’s not just someone in their corner doing it, but it’s a collaborative work setting what are the core values, what are the expected behaviors and the ones associated with each one of the values, and then it’s communicated throughout the whole company. When it comes to performance review it needs to be designed with underrepresented communities in mind.

Lamya Alaoui: Performance reviews, if you look at the history of how it was designed, it was designed for a very specific community or population. It doesn’t fit other people. Just leave it at that. Work on creating a performance review management system that is more inclusive. Yeah. Targeted networking. Again, this ties to the diversity and leadership. One of the things, again, hiring in despair. When those roles are open, people tend to hire fast from networks that they know because they don’t have networks that are already established. This is something that is quite helpful. I don’t think there are any people in the HR realm tonight, but all of you can be ambassadors for something like this to be established in your companies. And again, clear expectations around the engagement and the roles. What are the pathways to promotions? Again, if you look at internal promotions or internal applications, woman tend for, this is just an example, women tend not to apply to internal openings when it comes to higher positions in the company.

Lamya Alaoui: Sometimes just because they don’t check all the boxes so the work starts before that, where we actually need to make sure that the job descriptions or the job openings are reflecting and are being thoughtful about underrepresented groups. Finally, this is one of my favorite things, Kaizen. There is always room for improvement. Performance and diversity are a very long journey. Each company is at a different stage or different phase. Just ask questions, be kind because not a lot of people think about it when it comes to those things and be as curious as possible because at the end of the day the only way to know other people is to ask questions. Thank you so much everyone.

Julie Choi: I want to thank all of our speakers tonight and for all of you, for being such an incredible audience. We have people who have been watching these talks outside in the overflow and I’m told that, I think it might be better if we just all go out and just mingle. Get some fresh air after all this time is for us to connect and network. Why don’t we continue the conversation outside? Thank you everybody.

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This site reliability engineer discusses Ukranian borscht or machine learning, or both, at MosaicML Girl Geek Dinner.

mosaicml girl geek dinner speakers tiffany williams banu nagasundaram laura florescu julie choi lamya alaoui shelby heinecke angela jiang angie chang amy zhang

MosaicML Girl Geek Dinner speakers after the event: Tiffany Williams, Banu Nagasundaram, Laura Florescu, Julie Choi, Lamya Alaoui, Shelby Heinecke, Angela Jiang, Angie Chang, and Amy Zhang.

Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

“Unique Paths to Machine Learning Careers”: Julie Choi, Chief Growth Officer at MosaicML, and Laura Florescu, Machine Learning Researcher at MosaicML (Video + Transcript)

Like what you see here? Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

Angie Chang: Next up, we have women from MosaicML sharing their unique journeys to machine learning careers. I want to welcome Julie Choi, MosaicML Chief Growth Officer and Laura Florescu, MosaicML, Machine Learning Researcher.

Angie Chang: And they’ll share about how they worked at several tech companies, eight total, including a few unicorns and blue chips, and their reason for joining forces at a new startup focused on making machine learning training better for everyone and please do ask questions of these ladies in the Q&A section of Zoom. They welcome your questions and welcome, Julie and Laura!

Julie Choi: Hi everyone. Let me just pull up this, great hello, Happy International Women’s Day, Laura!

Laura Florescu: Happy International Women’s Day!

Julie Choi: I’m so happy to be here with you in our San Diego offices together in real life. So really, really happy to be here with everyone. Thank you so much. The Girl Geek X organization and Angie and everybody, I know it takes so much work to put this event together and we’re just thrilled to be here today to share from our own career stories, as well as from our current intersection where we’re working at MosaicML to train machine learning models faster.

Julie Choi: So let’s get started with Laura and we’re going to take Q&A at the end. We’ll reserve some time. So Laura, you are a machine learning researcher at MosaicML, and it’s just been a joy and delight to get to know you. Can you tell us more about your path that got you to this point?

Laura Florescu: Yes. Thank you, Julie, would love to. So my journey starts in Bucharest, Romania, where I grew up and went to school. I went to a math and computer science high school, and I guess I just kind of loved math. My father had a deep appreciation for it. And so that wore off a little bit to me.

Laura Florescu: And afterwards I went to Reed College in Oregon when I moved to the United States to study mathematics. And so that’s where my academic roots began. And afterwards for a year I worked at Los Alamos National Lab, where pretty much I learned programming and that’s how I got kind of interested more in engineering and technology.

Laura Florescu: And afterwards I wanted to do my PhD. So I started at New York University and I had the honor and pleasure to write a book with my PhD advisor. And so I got my degree in math, computer science, and afterwards I moved to Silicon Valley where I got interested in AI in startups, entrepreneurship, and I made the decision to join right after a small, at the time, startup called Grok. So they are working on custom hardware for inference in machine learning.

Laura Florescu: So I worked on compilers on machine learning there. I learned a ton and afterwards I went to SambaNova Systems also kind of following my passion of accelerating neural networks training. So SambaNova is also building custom hardware for training neural networks. So I worked on many different areas there as well.

Laura Florescu: And now for about a year, I joined forces with you at MosaicML, again, with the same kind of goal of accelerating AI now through more algorithmic side and system optimizations.

Julie Choi: Amazing. I have one question. I mean, this is a brilliant journey and so many amazing points along the way. How did you decide to go into industry versus academia after your PhD?

Laura Florescu: Yeah. So I think a lot of people finishing their PhDs have that exact dilemma. I definitely did and I think I realized I wanted to have more impact in the world, kind of work on work on something that basically the whole world can benefit from. And I felt Silicon Valley and startups in particular would give me that opportunity to do so.

Julie Choi: So it was about impact?

Laura Florescu: Right. Yeah.

Julie Choi: Great.

Laura Florescu: Yeah. Thank you, Julie.

Julie Choi: Sure.

Laura Florescu: So you are Chief Growth Officer at MosaicML. Can you tell us a little bit about your path and where you have been to get to here?

Julie Choi: I’d love to thank you so much. Yeah. When I was a kid growing up in LA, I didn’t imagine that at this age I would be a Chief Growth Officer. Those jobs didn’t exist back then.

Julie Choi: But I think when I look back on the journey, it kind of makes sense that I’m doing what I’m doing because my job right now is to connect us, right? To build relationships with engineers in the research community, as well as at large or medium or small companies who are looking to build AI. And so I am a connector and I’m a people person, but I am…

Julie Choi: I identify as a nerd. So I started my journey in LA. I grew up as an immigrant. Actually I immigrated to LA from South Korea. My parents moved us here when I was the age of three, and my sister was 0.2, literally just born. And we moved here with kind of everything we had and settled in first El Segundo and then North Torrance, if anyone knows Southern California geography.

Julie Choi: And my parents worked very, very hard. They owned a 7-11 store in Lawndale, close to Inglewood. And so they were very, very, very busy and they basically left my sister and I to kind of figure out what we wanted to do with our spare time. And as many kids during the 80s did, I watched a lot of TV on my own.

Julie Choi: I played video games and I just gravitated towards robots and transformers and robo tech, Voltron, anything mechanical as well as these stories of good versus evil. And I identified with the few female heroes that were in these cartoons. And I guess that kind of just spurred me on towards my path in education.

Julie Choi: I went to MIT, continued to find my people and find my groove. But when I graduated, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. So I went into consulting. And I started, I spent five years working with fortune 1000 types of enterprise companies, helping them solve problems, primarily in the security domain.

Julie Choi: So I was a hacker, I was hired to penetrate systems. And that was probably the first time I realized what it felt to be the only woman in the room, especially at RSA Conference. Wow. I was the only woman in the room usually and I was just like, wow, okay. But actually even then my team was extremely supportive and I had allies around me and it was like, do whatever it took to make that customer successful.

Julie Choi: And so I moved to Silicon Valley and here we are at MosaicML. I mean the Silicon Valley chapter also intersects with personally a lot of things, right? I met my husband, had my children, settled in where I live now. And at the same time growing in an understanding of what I wanted to do. And most recently, before deciding to go to MosaicML, I was at Intel and at Intel, I spent four very impactful years helping establish the AI business and brand for Intel.

Julie Choi: And actually the last time I gave a talk was Intel at a Girl Geek X conference. So it’s kind of amazing to do this again, about two years later.

Julie Choi: So here we are at MosaicML and we are here and so excited on this journey to accelerate AI development. And we’re doing this kind of differently than anyone else because we’re applying algorithmic research as well as system level optimizations to speed the way neural networks are trained.

Julie Choi: And so what I would love is given your research and engineering expertise, Laura, is if you could talk us through why neural network training is so important.

Laura Florescu: Yeah. Thank you, Julie, of course. So just a very briefly, a little bit about neural networks and why they’re so important and basically why we’re focusing on them. So there’s simply a series of algorithms mimicking the human brain to recognize patterns and relationships in vast amounts of data.

Laura Florescu: And so very briefly in the image below, you can see we have been given a number of images containing the number five and a bunch of neurons that are trained then through providing this kind of data in order to recognize features and textures and patterns in the images in order to correctly identify what the image is.

Laura Florescu: So through such iterations, we learn to classify numbers in this specific example.

Julie Choi: Oh, so this is unstructured data going in kind of like images and speech?

Laura Florescu: Yeah, exactly. So it can be applied to many different fields, basically anything that you humans would, would create, right? So a bunch of images, a lot of language. So you can imagine the whole Wikipedia, the whole internet, right? Speech data.

Laura Florescu: So many, many different fields affecting all of us. And I guess the issue is the training costs for building such powerful large models have spiraled. So they can actually get into the million dollars range for a single run. And in order to build a powerful model, you need several iterations of such training. And so you can imagine quickly getting to tens of millions of dollars.

Julie Choi: Wow. That seems extremely difficult and limiting in terms of who has the capability to train neural networks today. So in general, what are the types of companies that have this capability in house?

Laura Florescu: Right, so those companies would be, Google, Meta, Microsoft who have access to such resources.

Julie Choi: I see. But it feels like for AI to really reach its potential, we need these capabilities to be in the hands of far more than these things.

Laura Florescu: Exactly.

Julie Choi: Enter MosaicML. So Laura, can you tell us about how Mosaic is accelerating the training of these neural nets?

Laura Florescu: Yeah. So that’s exactly where we come in and it’s my passion to work on such problems, especially as they apply to, as we have here, a couple of different tasks, different domains in which we have done research and shown significant progress.

Laura Florescu: So in the area of natural language processing, which encompasses everything from machine translation, everybody speaks different languages. So it’s huge question answering, information retrieval, sentiment analysis for Amazon reviews, for example.

Laura Florescu: So in this kind of area, through the research we have done by combining multiple algorithms, we have shown speedups of up to 3.7x on these GPT type models, which is the state of the art in language models.

Laura Florescu: And in computer vision, so such as classification, what I showed earlier here, you can see a couple of examples in detection and image segmentation, which are crucial for autonomous driving. So similarly through our research, by combining multiple algorithms, we can train such models up to 4.5x faster.

Julie Choi: So if I’m interpreting the speed or the impact of speed, does training 4.5 times faster mean that you can potentially train a model that would’ve taken four weeks in maybe one?

Laura Florescu: Exactly. Yeah. So you can iterate faster and your costs go down significantly.

Julie Choi: Awesome.

Laura Florescu: What’s really good about it in my opinion, another thing that we’re doing at Mosaic is we have open source our library of such algorithms. So you can visit it on GitHub, it’s called Composer. So it’s a flexible system to combine efficiently such different algorithms.

Laura Florescu: There are about 20 of them right now, and we’re actively researching and implementing more. And yeah, so we opensource that. We welcome community interaction, community feedback, as well as contributions to our open source library.

Julie Choi: And so is this available today for developer use?

Laura Florescu: Right. And that’s exactly how we got the kind of results that I just described.

Julie Choi: The 4x speed up on vision and four and a half… Okay, perfect.

Laura Florescu: Yeah. So my question to you, Julie, then is we have seen obviously how ML is so important and it’s affecting our lives, but why work in it? What’s in it for us?

Julie Choi: Yeah. So why work in ML? I’ve been working in ML for the past seven years. So I started working in machine learning at HPE, and then I went to Intel and I continued to choose to work in this domain because whether we’re ready to embrace it or not, the era of AI is happening now. I mean, it is not a future thing.

Julie Choi: There is so much data that we’re generating every day on our mobile devices and through our computers that now any company in it, not only the things, but there’s thousands of enterprise companies with legacy data and new data being generated, any organization can create AI systems.

Julie Choi: And so the era of AI is upon us because of the convergence of data, as well as tools that extract meaning from the data. And so I feel like it’s very imperative for me to be a part of developing tools that accelerate this adoption, because at the end of the day, AI systems are acting on my behalf.

Julie Choi: They are identifying who I am, right? And they are trying to make decisions on my behalf. And so I would like to be part of setting up the requirements for AIs, both from the ground up at the tooling level, which is where we’re involved as MosaicML and help educate builders of a AI applications so that we can consider basically people like me, right?

Julie Choi: And today is International Women’s Day. And basically almost 50% of the world identifies as female and that’s about 4 billion people. However, only 15% of the ML space in terms of research and science and development identifies as females. And so this is part of why I choose to work in this domain.

Julie Choi: And so actually, if that resonates and if what Laura, you and I discussed resonates with people that are attending the conference today, I really encourage you to join us here at Mosaic.

Julie Choi: It is an incredibly exciting time to be working on machine learning infrastructure and algorithmic software and to be shaping the space and the opportunity that AI presents. So I would like to just, maybe now we can move into question and answer, we’ll stop sharing, and then let’s go into Q and A. So there are a few.

Laura Florescu: Julie, I have a question for you.

Julie Choi: Yes.

Laura Florescu: Do you have any recommendation to someone who might not have any AI or ML background in order to get into the field?

Julie Choi: Yeah. I mean, I think education, there are so many materials out there, on Coursera, as well as there’s many organizations like Women in ML, Women in Data Science, these types of organizations.

Julie Choi: I would definitely go and look for the coursework, if you’re looking for a technical background and then just talk to people, right? Whether it’s over Zoom or now over coffee, learn from the practitioners who are out there.

Julie Choi: Again, I’ve been in this for seven years and so we’ve kind of come to a state where there are lots of sources of information. Yeah. It looks like, oh, I’m so sorry. There’s a lot of, I think we have a couple more minutes here.

Angie Chang: We’re actually out of time, but if you’ll hop into the chat, we can have you answer questions.

Julie Choi: Okay.

Angie Chang: Thank you Julie And Laura for sharing about machine learning careers and how MosaicML is making machine learning training better for everybody. 

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Girl Geek X Planet Lightning Talks! (Video + Transcript)

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  • Transcript of Planet Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks:

    Angie Chang: It’s six o’clock and that means it’s time for another Girl Geek Dinner, and this time, however, we are coming to you virtually for the first time!

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Just going virtual opens up our access to you and to you to each other, few people in various time zones, some people who say they’re in London at 2 A.M.

    Angie Chang: I’m just super excited to be able to partner with Planet and bring this evening of talks to hundreds of girl geeks.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: So today I’m going to talk about diversity and belonging and the climate that we’re at right now and how it’s not business as usual, and rethinking what diversity is going to looks like in 2020.

    Lisa Huang-North: And when you do make that leap into your new role, how long do you want to be there? Is there a stepping stone to another bigger career pivot? For example, if you’re moving to a new industry or is it a way for you to grow and really deepen your expertise, for example, within the industry or within the field?

    Sara Safavi: Along the way I’ve had to pick up some new habits, some new practices and ways of working in order to make my staye in remotesville as a remote employee sustainable.

    Barbara Vazquez: What I’m going to talk about today about agile development and estimation, because I’m a software engineer and we do agile development at Planet. These are some tips that might be useful on a day to day.

    Kelsey Doerksen: Today, I’m going to be talking a little bit about how to handle big data in space and the different machine learning projects I’ve been a part of over the past few years.

    Deanna Farago: My name is Deanna Farago and my team and I operate a fleet of satellites that are currently imaging the entire planet every day.

    Elena Rodriguez: I chose a topic because this is something that I’m always thinking about it, and now I have the opportunity to talk about it and I’m going to take advantage of this – this is how I ended up here, so I’m going to show you my story.

    Sarah Preston: Stories are passed to community and understanding. So think about all the stories that you loved growing up. There were some kind of connection that you made, either to a character, to the author or to the setting that drew you in and made it really memorable.

    Brittany Zajic: I’m on the business development team here at Planet. Business development means something different at every company. Here we focus strategic partnerships and the commercialization of new markets.

    Nikki Hampton: At Planet we have always been committed to diversity, but we are doubling down on our commitment and particularly so looking with respect to attracting and retaining communities of color. For all of you online, we are looking forward to and eager to work with you to tap into a broader network of talented folks that you might want to consider referring to us or applying and sharing with a who you know. But we’re super excited to have been part of this and are grateful that you all attended!

    Angie Chang: It’s six o’clock. And that means it’s time for another Girl Geek Dinner… This time, however, we are coming to you virtually for the first time from our homes in Berkeley, California here. Sukrutha, where are you?

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: I’m in San Francisco, California.

    Angie Chang: And behind the wings we have Amy, who is coming from … Amy, where are you coming from?

    Amy Weicker: Pennsylvania.

    Angie Chang: Pennsylvania. Awesome. We have a bunch of people coming in. Can you use the chat below and tell us where you’re coming in from? While everyone does that, Oh my God.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Wow. Orange County, San Jose. [inaudible] India, my hometown. What were you saying, Angie?

    Angie Chang: I’m like, normally we get to see you in a beautiful office space. It’s always great to just go to these different companies and go there and meet the people, eat their food, drink some wine — and then hear from their women at the company speaking about what they’re doing at the company. From roles in engineering and product to sales … we’re going to hear from a few sales people tonight .. It’s really great and exciting to hear from many of the women working at the company on what they love to do.

    Angie Chang: We learn a bit about the company. I’m just super excited to be able to partner with Planet and bring this evening of talks to hundreds of girl geeks. These videos will be available on YouTube for free later so if you can’t come because you actually had to cook dinner and eat it with your family, you can still watch it later.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: I want to just call out a few people in various time zones. Some people who say they’re in London at 2:00 AM, that’s awesome. India, 6:30 AM. That’s amazing, where in a funny way just going virtual opens up our access to you, and to you to each other 100% across time zones and across a variety of fronts. So that’s awesome.

    Angie Chang: Cool. I guess it’s time for introductions. My name’s Angie Chang. I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. I’ve been organizing these Bay Area Girl Geek dinners, as we called them for the first 10 years. Then now we’ve been doing Girl Geek X events. We’ve done over 200 events at companies big and small, at companies you’ve heard of and companies you haven’t. I think it’s really fun to keep doing it all these years because of that. You get to learn about so many companies that you never thought of. You go in there and you hear about all the ways that the company has people working in these different departments that you never knew existed. Suddenly you’re like, “Oh my God, I guess this sounds really cool.” By the end, when they’re like, “And we are hiring,” you’re like, “Yes, I know what you do. I know what team I can join. I heard from people at that company, I know their names. I can now find them on LinkedIn and poke them and send them my resume.” Please do that. They are hiring. Sukrutha?

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yeah. Hi, I’m Sukrutha. I’m the CTO of Girl Geek X. Angie and I met several years ago when I had just moved to the Bay Area looking for other like-minded women like yourself to connect with. I found out that there was an upcoming event with Girl Geek Dinner and I saw Angie’s name there. I was like, that’s awesome. I should try to go. For whatever reason, I wasn’t able to go that evening, and I instead managed to get the company I was working at to sponsor. Angie and I played phone tag for a little bit, but we ended up meeting and I was like, this is so exciting because that particular event had over 200 women AND men show up — 200 people show up, basically. It was such a great energy in the room. I just couldn’t get enough of it. I wanted to come back.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: That’s where our journey together started. That was dinner number 11. We’ve since had over 200 dinners. I’ve actually lost count. At that point it was one every few months. We ended up having the frequency just go up. We then launched into podcasts. We launched into virtual conferences. So you can see all of that content on our website (girlgeek.io). Just to catch up if you’re new to this, usually what we do in this situation is we survey the room and we ask how many of you are attending this event for the first time. I don’t know how we would do that now, but I’d be really curious to learn from virtually raising your hands. How many of you are attending for the first time? Wow. I can see the numbers, counting now over 40 people are raising their hands as the first time.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Wow. That number’s climbing, Angie. That’s amazing. I’m so happy to see so many first time attendees. Generally, like for us, it has been amazing because we would get so much out of these dinners, the podcast that we do, as well as the conferences, because the energy from just meeting other people specifically like you, you may not have that access in your company. We were getting so much out of it. We would hear from the sponsoring company, how they were getting access to really motivated, smart individuals like yourself, where they ordinarily wouldn’t have the access to. Likewise, the attendees would come to these events and they’d be like, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t realize that were these many people who are just like me.” And then they started to make friendships. Often Angie and I would talk about how important it is to network before you actually need it.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: I myself was super shy and awkward. And honestly, I still am. Who knows with the pandemic and sitting at home how awkward I’m going to be in real life when all of this lifts, but I do force myself. I learned from Angie, actually, how best to get involved in a conversation and approach people that I know I can benefit from that connection and they can benefit from it, as well. We started to build our circle. From that, I learned concepts like build your own personal board of directors, people who advise you in your career and your work life balance and topics like that. Then people who give you honest feedback on how you can improve yourself. So many things like mentorship and sponsorship and how to go about seeking that for yourself and how not to directly just go up to someone and be like, “Just be my mentor,” but then not give them enough context. So how to go about it the right way. There’s usually tips and tricks like that, that we will benefit most from asking other people who’ve had shared experiences like ourselves. What do you think, Angie? What do you think people get out of this?

    Angie Chang: I really appreciate going to Girl Geek Dinners and then Girl Geek events, because we reach a wide range of women who are working in tech and engineering and product. Also a lot of startup entrepreneurs and operations and marketing people. And they all intersect. I think in our careers, which are going to stand for decades, we are definitely going to be changing our jobs, and our roles will be different. I remember when I first met Sukrutha, she was a software engineer in test, and now she’s a senior engineering manager and it’s been years and it’s been great watching her change her career and grow and continue to look for … I think people look for people like them.

    Angie Chang: If I were an engineer, which I was 15 years ago, I would go to a Girl Geek Dinner and I’d be like, “I want to meet other engineers,” but then you wouldn’t have that happy chance of meeting other people, women who are working in other roles, but then you’d be like, “Oh my God, this is actually really cool.” These weak ties and these relationships are actually really beneficial in the long run. I don’t think I would have asked for it when I was younger, to meet all these different types of people, but now I really see it’s fortuitous and it pays to be a little broader. I like the Girl Geek X umbrella, instead of saying I’m only in product, which I was for a few years, or I’m only an entrepreneur, which I was for a few years.

    Angie Chang: Now, it’s just a great place to meet a lot of people. They keep coming back. We actually keep seeing a lot of faces. There’s always a lot of new people and a lot of people that come back time and again, based on who is hosting. We’ll be having different companies host virtual events moving forward monthly. You can look forward to different companies. But tonight we’re really excited to bring you the Girl Geeks of Planet Labs. I am going to be introducing our first speaker from Planet Labs, Adria.

    Angie Chang: Here’s a quick bit about her. She joined Planet’s federal division in Washington, DC as a people partner, where she was able to continue her passion for innovation and data with strategic human capital. She earned her master’s degree at Georgetown university with a research focus on diversity, equity and inclusion in tech. She is co-lead to Planet’s belonging taskforce. Welcome, Adria.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here. This is such a great event, and it’s my first time. Obviously my first time as a panelist, but my first time attending the event. I’m just so excited to have so many people here listening to our talks and just connecting with women in different industries. I’m excited to just attend future events later on. Thanks so much for the introduction.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Let’s jump into a little bit about Planet. I’m going to share my-

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Adria, would you like to turn on your video so people can see you?

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Oh, I’m so sorry.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: No worries.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: I think we can all relate. I think this has happened to probably all of us. We’re all in a remote workforce right now. Maybe everyone can raise their hand if they’ve forgotten their video once or twice. Thank you. That made me feel a little bit better. Let me share my screen really quickly with everyone. We will jump into a little bit about Planet and then … oops, sorry … I will jump into my presentation.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: About Planet, aerospace know how meet Silicon Valley ingenuity. From our spacecraft to our APIs, we engineer our hardware and software to service the largest fleet of earth imaging satellites in orbit and scale our seven plus petabyte imagery archive, growing daily. Planet designs, builds, and launches satellites faster than any company or government in history by using lean, low cost electronics and design iteration. Our Doves, which make up the world’s largest constellation of earth imaging satellites, line scan the planet to image the entire earth daily, which is really cool. We launch new satellites into orbit every three or four months. Most earth imaging companies don’t build their own satellites, but we’re not like most earth imaging companies. Planet designs and builds its satellites in house, allowing us to iterate often and pack the latest technology into our small satellites.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Complete vertical integration enables us to respond quickly to customer needs and perpetually evolve our technology. Operating one satellite is a challenge, but operating 200 is completely unprecedented. If you haven’t checked out our Ted Talk on YouTube, I highly, highly suggest you do. Planet’s submission is really cool. I’ll dive into a little bit about why I love working at Planet in a little bit, but it really is unprecedented. Our mission control team uses patented automation software to manage our fleet of satellites, allowing just a handful of people to schedule imaging windows, push software into orbit and download images to 45 ground stations throughout the world. Planet processes and delivers imagery quickly and efficiently. We use the Google Cloud platform and enable custom processing so that customers can tap directly into our data the same way we do. Our data pipeline ensures easy web and API access to Planet’s imagery and archive. We make every scene available as a tile service, composite scenes into mosaics, and build time slice mosaics so you can see change over time. That’s a little bit about us.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: I am the first speaker, so I’m just going to dive into my talk. I hope that was a high level overview of Planet. Every person that works at Planet is super passionate about our mission, what we do. I really can say that every time I’m out on the street and I do tell people that I work for Planet, our mission is just so cool, that we build our own satellites and we have daily earth imaging. It really is unprecedented. It’s a really cool place to work.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: On to my talk. I’m the people partner for Planet Federal. I work out of Washington, DC. Planet Federal, it’s the government arm of Planet. We partner with the government. I function as the people partner, which is basically HR. The people partner does function kind of as an HR business partner. Today I’m going to talk about diversity and belonging and the climate that we’re at right now, and how it’s not business as usual. We’re rethinking what diversity and belonging looks like in 2020.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: A little bit about me. I like to use the group identity wheel anytime I do any type of speaking related to diversity and belonging, because I think this is a really good representation, at least for me, the way I like to represent myself and my different group identities. I am a cis gendered woman. My pronouns are she/her. I’m a US national, identify as agnostic. I am a Black, queer lesbian living with disability. I’m a millennial, upper middle class, and I do hold an advanced degree. This framework is really good for me. I think it’s really good for others, just to kind of show places where I’m marginalized and places where different group identities that I am also dominant.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Let’s jump in. So why I joined Planet. It was an industry jump for me. I had about seven years in human resources. I started as a generalist. I grew into leadership and then I later expanded into consultancy. I’m really passionate about strategic HR and diversity, equity, and inclusion. I began looking for something in the tech industry. I wanted to feel really connected to the mission of the next place that I landed. I was instantly intrigued by Planet and their core values. Why I love working at Planet, and this is what keeps me passionate, keeps me engaged, it’s why I show up to work every day. I love my team. They’re brilliant. I can actually say this globally, across Planet. We just have a really talented group of individuals that work for our company. If we’re at coffee chats or happy hours or whatever you can just listen to people for hours.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Everyone is just brilliant at what they do, and everyone is so passionate about how they contribute to Planet’s mission. The work that I do is really great for me. It is what I’m passionate about. I get to do that every day. Planet is dedicated to agility and learning, which is something that’s really important to me, especially being in the people department. I love working on the people team because I really enjoy fostering connection and collaboration between teams.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Let’s dive into the topic today of what I wanted to talk about for this lightning talk, which is diversity and belonging. This year has been a tough year, and I think we’re all in agreement. We face a global pandemic. We’re facing systematic racism and police brutality, political unrest, and let us not forget the murder hornet scare in May. Just in case you did forget, I put a little slide here. It did terrify me, I think, as well as some others. Wanted to add a little bit of levity there. This was an addition to our plates, I think, that we did not need in May. But so let’s dive into the topic for today. We are a nation that’s currently experiencing trauma. Filmed police brutality and racist interactions have flooded our broadcasts as well as social media. It’s something that we’re seeing every day. Many, from all backgrounds and racial identities, have filled the streets in protest to support Black Lives Matter. In response to this, a number of companies have put out statements in solidarity, and it’s forcing many companies, including Planet, to grapple with internal diversity statistics and consequently rethink diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Let’s talk a little bit about statistics. Statistics show that Black employees are left behind. In 2014, Google released their diversity statistics, which many tech companies followed suit after that. But before that it wasn’t something that companies widely released. Statistics over the past six years have shown that despite diversity efforts by most organizations, Black representation remains extremely low with a net change that is almost nonexistent. Statistics do show a slight increase for women in tech, which shows that some diversity efforts are working, but some marginalized groups are still being left behind, which is super important to look at. Let’s look a little bit at the delta for Black employees and tech. So this is a really good representation to just show you over the past five to six years there really hasn’t been a change, despite companies having large funding towards diversity, having diversity programs in place.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: The numbers still remain extremely low. There has been, as I said, an increase for women in tech. It’s been a small increase. There’s still so much room to go, but there has been some strides made there. So just wanted to show a little bit of visual representation of that data. Let’s talk about why diversity efforts are failing. This is what I mean when I’m talking about diversity, quote, unquote business as usual. This is what companies have been doing for decades. Despite a few new bells and whistles that came about in the ’90s, companies have been essentially doubling down on the same approaches that they’ve been doing since the ’60s, which is diversity training to reduce bias. I think many of us have held trainings like that if you’re in people operations, like I am, or maybe you’ve attended a training like that. Hiring tests and performance ratings that limit bias, and putting grievance systems in place for employees to challenge managers.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: These tools are really designed to preempt lawsuits. I think that framework is even in the wording. When we do attend these trainings, it’s very fear-based, I would say. They don’t dive further than that. They don’t dive further to promote equity and inclusion. Now we’re seeing a shift. Employees are demanding change. Companies can no longer operate business as usual in diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Employees don’t want a PR statement from the organization, but rather they want to see a clear action plan related to inclusion and anti racist efforts. This really falls in the wheelhouse of the people team.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: It is an organizational wide effort, but it’s something that I’m proud to be involved in. I wanted to talk a little bit about that today. Moving toward belonging and the new landscape for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. I really, really love this framework and I wanted to make sure I included in this talk. Diversity has no meaning without inclusion and belonging. Diversity is like being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance and belonging is dancing like no one is watching. Belonging is really being able to show up at work as your true self, and being able to be your authentic self in the workplace. We spend so much time at work that really having this piece where you’re being invited to the party without having these other pieces, it doesn’t mean anything. This is exactly why these diversity efforts are failing.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: I’m not going to dive super into the inclusion framework here, but I did want to include a visual of the sweet spot for inclusion, which is a high level of belongingness and a high value in uniqueness. What that results in is an individual being treated as an insider, and also allowed and encouraged to retain uniqueness within their work group. Let’s talk a little bit about definitions, because a lot of times, I think you can get these trendy words that are happening within diversity or even happening within HR, within people. Belonging can be pegged as a trendy word and it’s really not. I wanted to be explicit about the definitions. Belongingness has to do with whether or not a person is and feels treated as an organizational insider. Uniqueness is measured by the degree to which an individual feels he or she can bring his or her full self to the work without needing to assimilate to cultural norm.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: The degree to which an employee can fully engage, feel safe, and feel connected in the workplace greatly depends on these two categories. And like I said, these can often be left out of diversity programs. So let’s dive a little further into diversity without belonging. Like I said, diversity without belonging inclusion allows marginalized groups into the organization, but then it forces them to fit in to the existing dominant culture. Many Black employees, for example, experience a pass on promotion, noting that they should get to know other managers more, or network more, or connect more. There’s really not explicit definitions in terms of what that really means. For many marginalized groups, Black employees specifically, they report not feeling safe to connect at work and be their authentic self due to cultural difference and fear of bias or repercussions. There’s a real barrier there. Statistics show that attrition rates among Black employees and those of other marginalized groups are much higher. A 2017 report surveyed over 2000 tech employees who left their jobs. It found that many people of color felt that they had unfairly been passed over for promotion, faced stereotyping or bias related to quote unquote fitting in or connecting with others.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Let’s talk about getting it right. I mean, that’s what I really want to talk about in this talk. When belonging and inclusion are embedded in company culture, it no longer forces employees to fit into the dominant culture, but rather it builds a culture around everyone’s unique identities. Rethinking strategy. Belonging becomes the heartbeat behind an organization’s culture and core values. I’m proud to say that that’s something Planet is working towards and I think that they value. I am the co-lead on the belonging task force. I can really say that that is embedded in Planet’s core values. Without inclusion and belonging, employees do not feel as though they can show up as their authentic self at work, like I said before. This inhibits recruitment, retention, and promotion of marginalized groups, and it also inhibits diverse voices from speaking up and being heard. Let’s talk about creating sustainable change. An internal and external audit is something that must be done.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Companies, including Planet, must take a long, hard look in the mirror and they must sit with what they see. What are the diversity statistics amongst marginalized groups, specifically Black employees in this climate? What are the attrition rates amongst these groups? How do these systems that organizations have in place contribute to oppression of these groups? Creating a safe space for employees and fostering belonging is also really important. I’m sure a lot of you have heard about employee resource groups, or maybe you’re a member of one.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: They’re a great place to create a safe space for employees to connect. They’ve actually been in effect since 1964, and they were established as a response to anti-black prejudice following the 1964 riots in New York. They’ve continued to be a huge part of the tech community, but companies must really be careful to utilize these groups as a safe space, rather than placing extra burden on them by forcing them to do organizational diversity work and education on top of their jobs. Especially with us being women in tech, sometimes the burden can fall on the marginalized group to do the education, to do the work on top of their jobs. That’s not really the purpose of an employee resource group. It’s to create that safe space, to create belonging, and to create connection. Employers should really watch that and be careful of putting that burden on the employees.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Looking at the internal and external pipeline of candidates is also really important. Talent and recruitment reform, I think is the biggest part of this. You want to audit your hiring practices, and broadening the schools that you recruit from is really important and including HBCUs, it’s also really important. Recognizing bias against HBCUs and other university programs as being seen as a lower bar is the first step in that. I think that’s something that a lot of tech companies are looking at right now. Also auditing referral programs. So I think referral programs sometimes can fall by the wayside, especially in tech. If a workforce is already homogenous, referrals can further contribute to this as referrals from employees tend to be within their own identity groups.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: I challenge everyone on this video to think about when you’re referring people into your organizations, are you amplifying diverse voices? Who are you referring, or is it homogenous? This is something that even as employees, we can be thinking about when we’re bringing people into our organization.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: Addition of external efforts, and this is something I’m really proud to partner or be involved with Planet. Recognizing the disparity of marginalized groups in tech and committing to investment in community partnerships and education is also huge in creating sustainable change. An example of this is investing money to give black and LatinX students exposure to geospatial and STEM studies and potentially creating an internship pipeline based on such programs.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: The last portion I want to talk about is mentorship programs. I think Angie highlighted, it was either Angie or Amy, highlighted mentorship in the beginning of this. People in senior roles tend to want to mentor and groom people who look like them or remind them of themselves. This is implicit bias. It’s unconscious bias. It’s not on purpose. But this means that people in marginalized groups often do not have someone to advocate for them. Organizations and managers within these organizations, if you’re a people leader on your team, you should be intentional about diversity in mentorship programs rather than leaving it up to senior management.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: The last portion is stamina. This isn’t a checklist. This isn’t a quick fix. This isn’t a measurable ROI. ROI is like always what executives want to hear is if you’re on the operations team or maybe you’re a people leader on your team I’m sure you talk a lot about ROI, building business cases for everything that you want to pass through. But that’s not the case here. This is systemic change that we’re trying to create at the organizational level, which is sustained over years of hard work to see measurable results. Companies must commit to sustainable change over time at every level of the company to value and prioritize diverse and inclusive workforces.

    Adria Giattino-Johnson: I’ll end this just by saying, I am so excited to be a part of these efforts at Planet. I look forward so much forward to seeing sustainable change within our company, and I hope that your companies are also working to create sustainable change. I hope that your voices are being heard. This is a really important time for all of our companies, especially within the tech community. I’ll be excited to see what type of change happens within the tech community in years to come. So thank you so much.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi. Thank you so much, Adria. That was wonderful. It was really inspiring for sure for me. We’re going to switch over to our next amazing panelist, Lisa Huang-North. I’m going to do a quick introduction and then we can jump into Lisa. Wow, great background, Lisa! Lisa is a product and program lead at Planet. The team is responsible for delivering product solutions that help customers scale their business. Before joining Planet, Lisa worked for over a decade in strategic consulting, finance, digital marketing, and full stack software engineering. In her free time, you can find Lisa building Lego Technic sets, coaxing her sourdough starter, and dreaming of the day when we can all travel to see friends and family again. Oh my gosh, don’t we all? Welcome, Lisa.

    Lisa Huang-North: Thank you very much, and thank you for the intro. Let me share my screen. Hopefully, everyone had a great time listening to Adria’s talk. I’m really excited to be following such a fantastic speaker. Can you all see my screen?

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

    Lisa Huang-North: Hopefully, yes. Okay, wonderful. Yeah. Really today I’m hoping to speak with you around pivoting, and I think especially with 2020, it’s really thrown the spinner. I think a lot of people’s plan, whether that be life plans or career plans and career pivots, there’s never really a good time for it, but it’s even more stressful when there’re uncertainties around that. I’m hoping today I can share three lessons from our satellite operation team and really get you to think around how you can plan for your career pivot.

    Lisa Huang-North: To start, let’s see. Here we go. All right. Firstly, about me, I’m currently a product and program lead here at Planet, and I’m also a part of our wonderWomen ERG group that Adria mentioned earlier, [inaudible] taskforce. I call myself a Pivoteur with five career pivots. Prior to COVID shutdown, I loved to travel. Hopefully that’s something that resonate with everyone. And here, I just included a short quote because that was part of what inspired my brief or the talk, was Robert Frost’s poem around traveling or taking the road less traveled.

    Lisa Huang-North: The first lesson, what are your areas of interest? A lot of the time for our satellite operation team, the first thing they need to know about tasking on satellite is, where do you want to look, and what do you care about? I will use two use case to try to explain. The first one, perhaps you’re in agriculture. Perhaps you are a farmer, in which case, the area that interests you could be roads. You’re trying to find the roads that will help you travel to your farms versus if you’re a civil government, for example, someone in San Francisco who is doing city planning, the things you care about will probably be buildings or infrastructure, and not so much about the road itself to a farm land area.

    Lisa Huang-North: Using these sample lessons similarly for you, when you’re planning your career pivots or career changes, that will be my question to you, what are your areas of interest? That can be an industry, a vertical, perhaps you really tech or you want to try out finance or non-profit. Maybe it’s a skillset that you want to gain along the way, or perhaps it’s really about a national or geographic location, you want to move to the city or you want to be closer to family. So those are interesting points to consider around your area of interest.

    Lisa Huang-North: In my case, it was a combination of all of those when I did my first two career pivots, I will say. I started off in Chicago, my career as a mutual fund data analyst. So, that was at Morningstar. And one of the things that I personally felt was really important was a chance to work abroad because I think it’s important to learn about different culture and get a chance to work and live in those places [inaudible 00:39:30] traveler.

    Lisa Huang-North: And that’s what brought me to my first opportunity where the company went through a merger and acquisition and I volunteered, interviewed, and ended up moving to Cape Town, South Africa, where I headed up the data operations for our Sub-Saharan African office. And that’s the picture on the left. And after doing that for a couple years, I realized, hey, data analyst is great. I get to learn a lot about data operations and logistics and business analytics, but I really want to do something more creative now. And I love something that’s more customer facing and somewhere where I can work on my marketing or communication skills. So that was my second pivot where I moved and became a food writer. I know, I know a little off course, but it was something fun. I was in my early twenties and for me, it was about the skillset that I wanted to gain and in the immediate format.

    Lisa Huang-North: All right, lesson number two, what are your time of interest? A lot of the time for our satellite operation team, they need to know what the targeted time period for our customers, our users will want to see imagery of. Again, going back to the earlier examples, if you’re in agriculture, for example, a farmer. Your time of interest is probably quite seasonal. For example, with this picture, you actually see a lot of the circular fields. That’s what you’ll spot throughout the U.S. And in their case, their time of interest would probably be spring because they’re planning for the growing season and they really need to know what the health of their fields are. However, going back to civil government, if you’re looking at zoning or city planning, or even thinking about where do I want to develop the city, building more infrastructure, building new highways, some of those time of interest could be longer term instead of a season. You’re looking at your own year or even multi-year horizons.

    Lisa Huang-North: So think about that when you’re going through a career change or planning for it, what is your time of interest? Are you looking at something that will happen within the next 12 months, two years? And when you do make that leap into your new role, how long do you want to be there? Is there a stepping stone to another bigger career pivot, for example, if you’re moving to a new industry or is it a way for you to grow and really deepen your expertise, for example, within the industry or within the field. And feel free to put your thoughts in the Q and A as well, it’s always fun to make it interactive as you are pondering through these lessons.

    Lisa Huang-North: So in my case, I would say while I was becoming a food writer, I fell into digital marketing because a lot of writing and communication are augmented by social media. And from there I discovered one of my passions, which is in public speaking. So for me, my time of interest at the time was really to hone my public speaking skills and communication skills. And one of my capstone projects or goal I set for myself was to speak at the TEDx event. And at the time Cape Town held or organized various TEDx events. There’s ones organized by the university and there’s ones organized by the city itself. And I was able to, again, submit the talk proposal and be selected and really presented. And that was where I had the unique opportunity to meet Archbishop Desmond Tutu, as well. Still one of the highlights in that time of my life.

    Lisa Huang-North: And carrying that forward, now my next time of interest was looking at two to three year horizon where I said, “I have my data analytic skills down. I have my creative marketing skills down. What do I want to learn next?” And I really wanted to be able to build a product so that I’m not just talking about it or selling it or analyzing it if I can build the end to end user experience. And that’s where it brought me to my next pivot into a full stack software engineer role. And I went through a coding boot camp where I really learned the full stack where on the backend learning Ruby and on the front end learning JavaScript, using frameworks such as Ember.js and React.js. And that’s the photo you see on the top right. Again, I like to have milestones or capstone project for myself, and for that one, I really wanted to present some fine learnings in the form of a conference talk. And I was able to present at GDG in Madrid, that’s Google Developer Groups, during my travels when I was in Madrid. Think about the time of interest as you pursue your next career change.

    Lisa Huang-North: All right, lesson number three, and I think this one is actually one of the most important one. And it’s a reasonable or logical extension coming from area of interest, time of interest, and now what are your success criteria? Using the earlier examples, if we are looking at those as an agricultural farmer. This image on the screen, it’s probably not very successful because I don’t see a lot of farming or agricultural land near San Francisco downtown. Whereas if the photo was of [inaudible] with garlic farming or even of Napa Valley with the wine industry there, that probably makes a lot more sense and that image will be successful, right?

    Lisa Huang-North: But again, going back to city, if you are San Francisco government and you’re doing city zoning and infrastructure development, this image is probably perfect for your use case. You’re able to see downtown, you’re able to see Embarcadero. And in fact, you can even see Presidio on the top and the bridge, The Golden Gate Bridge. And even with Karl the Fog, the clouds, we’re always looking up for cloud covers at Planet, even though the cloud obfuscate the left side of the city, you really get to see 90% of the city.

    Lisa Huang-North: So this image for civil government will be successful. So link in to that, what are the factors for your success criteria? Is it about the job, the scope of the role, maybe it’s about salary because you’re at the time of your life where you need to provide for your family and financial stability is key. Or perhaps if you’re younger and earlier in your career journey and for you, personal growth and learning is the key factor for your success criteria. So think about that as you’re planning your career change and planning for the next pivot.

    Lisa Huang-North: In my case, I would say that through those different career changes, initially the success criterias were pretty immediate. Which are, what skills can I learn? And am I having fun with it? Am I having fun while I’m changing these different jobs or learning new things? And I would say on the top left, this was at a friend’s wedding in Durban, South Africa. And for me at the time, the social aspect was a huge thing, too. I really wanted to meet people. I wanted to experience different cultures and those, my lifestyle choices, were integral pieces to my success criteria beyond professional growth.

    Lisa Huang-North: And slowly as I moved back to the U.S., I would say that my success criteria has changed over time. And now, instead of just focusing on perhaps immediate and personal gains, I’m really looking at how I can integrate or how I can be closer to families and what that means for my lifestyle and what I want in the longterm, starting a family, for example, mentoring other women in tech. And that’s how I’ve been involved in Women in Product and Tech Ladies. And in some ways, still trying to get connected with my roots from when I ran the startup by attending startup conferences and just keeping fingers on the pulse about what’s happening in the startup space. So that was really key shift from personal growth lifestyle to professional, family, as well as any mentorship impact.

    Lisa Huang-North: And that ultimately was what brought me to Planet. I think, as Adria mentioned, a lot of us here at Planet, we are fully aligned with Planet’s mission. And one of the success criteria for me when I went through the latest round of job search was around impact. I really wanted to join a company where I myself can be contributing to something that is impactful at the global scale. And really, Planet way surpassed that and some more because I would say beyond global, this is really a planetary and specie level. And I think hopefully with the use case I have shared, you can see how it impacts industries at the time. And I’m sure some of the speakers later will share even more interesting story such as forestry or crisis management. And you’ll get to hear a lot more. So take this time in the question Q and A area, if you can think about what your success criteria are, start sharing that with us.

    Lisa Huang-North: So finally, savor the journey. I think bringing back the three lessons about area of interest, time of interest, and your success criteria, another thing to remember is that while we are in the midst of career change or any pivot, the uncertainties are probably quite stressful. And you may feel like you don’t really know where you’re going, or if you are going to be able to attain the goals that you have set out for yourself. But as a famous saying go, hindsight is always 20/20. And while you’re in it, you may feel like you’re going through a rough divergence, snaking around from place to place. And it doesn’t feel like a linear path, but looking back, or if you zoom out and take a bird’s eye view, you’ll probably realize that you’ve made something beautiful and you have created this fantastic journey for yourself, where all those different skills and experience you pick up along the way were pieces of the puzzle. And ultimately when you piece all of them together, they look really stunning.

    Lisa Huang-North: So I hope that will help to lessen some of the stress, anxiety you’re feeling as you put it through these uncertain times. And to close, obviously, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out and let’s chat. You can connect with me on Twitter, on LinkedIn. I will be here for the networking event later on as well. So definitely reach out and we are hiring. So always happy to chat about Planet. Thank you.

    Angie Chang: Thank you, Lisa. We are running a little behind, so we’re going to skip the Q&A but feel free to ask the questions and we will ask Lisa and we will share them later in a blog post with everyone. But right now our next speaker is Sara. And we’ll bring her right up. Hey, Sara.

    Sara Safavi: Hey, how’s it going?

    Angie Chang: Good. How are you?

    Sara Safavi: All right.

    Angie Chang: So… you can get your slides…

    Sara Safavi: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

    Angie Chang: Perfect. So Sara, by means of intro and [inaudible]. She leads the developer relations team at Planet Labs. Welcome, Sara.

    Sara Safavi: Thank you. All right. So yes, I will get started. Like Angie said, I lead the DevRel team here at Planet Labs. And what I want to talk to you all about today is my experience working remote. I’ve been working remotely, both here at Planet and prior to Planet for about five or six years. So about three years here at Planet and then a couple different companies before. Along the way, I’ve had to pick up some new habits, some new practices and ways of working in order to make my stay in Remotesville as a remote employee sustainable.

    Sara Safavi: Tonight, I just wanted to share some of those tips with you and go through them really quick. I want to give you a starting point, not so much teach you everything, but a starting point you can reference if you’re also somewhere at the beginning of this journey. I know a lot of us are, especially in the last couple of months, so it’s a topic that we’ve all been talking about. And this, if you ask somebody for their one tip for working remotely, this one is probably what you’ll hear most of, establish a routine, make sure you have a routine.

    Sara Safavi: I’m putting this first because it is so common that you’ll hear it. I have a couple of things I’ll mention after this less common, but I do think that this is important. But something important to notice here is that we’re new because I’m talking about establishing a new routine. You need to develop some new routine that works for you because this isn’t the same as your pre-Remotesville routine. Your life is no longer in the same patterns. You’re not going to get up in the morning and pack a lunch, probably. You’re not going to get into your car, stop at the gas station on the way. You probably not even going to put your shoes on in the morning.

    Sara Safavi: So it’s completely different scenario, which means it’s going to take a different routine. But routines are still important because our brains can be stupid. And we want to trick them. A routine helps you trick your brain into understanding that we’re getting ready for work, we’re going to work, we’re no longer sitting at home in bed, it’s not the weekend, it’s still a weekday. So taking that time to get dressed in the morning, do your hair, put on something that makes you feel powerful and professional. It really helps separate that situation in your head between home and work.

    Sara Safavi: So build a morning routine that takes care of you. Maybe do some yoga, meditate, go for a run, whatever it takes to establish that new routine. But some other things that people don’t necessarily talk about, a friend of mine shared this concept with me a couple of months ago, and I really love it. So I had to stick it in here. Teach yourself and give yourself permission to put your body first. What I really mean by this is a lot of times when we’re working solo at home, it can become really easy to just stop listening to our body’s needs. If we’re not changing what we’re doing or interacting with other people, if we’re just sitting at our desks for eight hours a day with a cat or a dog sitting under the desk, then you can really start ignoring your own body’s needs.

    Sara Safavi: So if you catch yourself feeling out of sorts or not able to get into that workflow like you usually do, or just feeling like something’s wrong, or you keep beating your head against the same bug for 10 minutes, take a minute and check in with yourself. See if there’s some body’s needs that you’ve been ignoring. Did you skip lunch? Have you not stood up from your desk for four hours? Since you don’t have like a water cooler to walk towards, maybe you forgot to get a drink of water, hydration is important. But just take a moment, check in with yourself because a lot of times, the ways that we’re feeling are actually directly related to ignoring what our body’s asking for.

    Sara Safavi: And similarly, talking about stepping away from your desk, when you’re working remotely, you really have to make space for scene changes. If you’re in an office, many times a day, you’re going to get up, you’re going to go to a conference room, you’re going to go visit your coworker’s desk, you’re going to go to somebody else’s desk and ask to see what they’re working on. You’ve got all these opportunities to change your scene, but when you’re working at home, you don’t have those opportunities anymore. So you have to deliberately make space for them. Schedule them into your daily routine. Maybe you’re going to take your dog for a walk for a half hour every afternoon. Put that on your work calendar. Or maybe every Monday morning, you water all your plants, put that on your calendar. Put dancing breaks on your calendar, I have friends that do that and I love it. You’re working remotely though, your schedule can be flexible, maybe you can do a yoga class at 1:00 PM. Maybe you have the freedom to do that, but you have to deliberately seek out those opportunities to change your scene.

    Sara Safavi: Similarly, you have to seek out connection. You really have to rethink what it means to make connection. If you’re working remotely, like I said, you don’t have those coworkers desks to walk to. You don’t have a water cooler. You don’t have a break room to go make a cup of coffee or grab your lunch and heat it up. You don’t have those natural opportunities for connection. So as a Remotesville citizen, you need to be deliberate and intentional about this. Instead of just telling a coworker on Slack, “Hey, we should get coffee sometime,” you should send them a calendar invite for 2:00 PM on Wednesday and say, “Hey, I’m going to be on Zoom, having coffee. Let’s chat.” Make it an intentional and easy way for them to accept and say, “Yeah, let’s connect.”

    Sara Safavi: Find opportunities to network. Find a network of other people working remotely, whether it’s at your current company or friends that you know who are in different companies. And if you don’t have a network already and you can’t find one, maybe that’s a perfect time for you to make your own. Something that’s really great that we overlook in remote work is coworking. It can be really great to just cowork with somebody. And I don’t mean an active Zoom chat, like a coffee break, where you’re talking back and forth, but maybe you just open a video call with a coworker and you guys just sit there in silence doing your own work together. It’s really companionable.

    Sara Safavi: So rethinking what we mean when we’re thinking about human connection and then being deliberate and intentional about it, is what’s going to make that remote work environment more sustainable. Something to watch for is to be aware about the creeping attraction of home comforts. So if you’re working in Remotesville, you’ve got a comfy couch, you’ve got a comfy bed, you’ve got all of the comforts of home, but I strongly recommend that you don’t work from your bed.

    Sara Safavi: So I know Deanna is going to talk to us later about satellite operations from bed, and I totally fully endorse it. I think that’s awesome. But what I mean when I say don’t work from bed is, don’t make this your normal Monday to Friday, nine to five office space. Like I said, brains are stupid. You need to trick your brain into understanding home versus workspace. You have to use sensory cues to signal that difference. You have to let yourself close an office door at the end of the day. So maybe you don’t actually have an office at your house, but maybe you have to mentally be able to close that door.

    Sara Safavi: If you’re working from your bed all day, it’s super comfortable. It’s awesome. Maybe you’re even really productive, but then the problem comes when it’s time to go to bed and you want to sleep, but your brain is like, “Oh, this is where I’ve been working all day.” So you start thinking about work again, and your brain starts turning the last problem you’re working on over in your head. And it’s really difficult to have that isolation. So maybe at home, you don’t have a lot of space, maybe you’re working from your dining table. That was me for the first two years of my remote career. But something you could do is put a lamp on that table and turn that lamp on only when you’re working. And when you’re done working, the lamp’s off. Little stuff like that, those sensory cues can really make a difference in being able to mentally close that office door.

    Sara Safavi: I’ve given you a lot of advice and I do want you to remember, these are interesting times where we’re living through right now. This isn’t the normal time that you would be switching to working remote in tech. So give yourself permission to practice a little self compassion and be kind to yourself, but also be honest because compassion doesn’t mean lying to yourself. So if you forget to step away from your desk for eight hours, or maybe you fail to put anything besides coffee and LaCroix in your body since 8:00 AM today, it’s okay. But it’s important to be honest and name that and understand that it happened and then just try again tomorrow. You understand that it’s important to listen to your body, to stay hydrated, to take those opportunities for scene change, and just try again tomorrow.

    Sara Safavi: So try to create a routine that works for you. A new routine. You’re not going to make your old routine work here. Take breaks. Remember to move around. Listen to your body and brain’s needs. Intentionally seek out human connection and make invitations to people that are easy to act upon that are not passive. And don’t let comfort creep overtake you. Try not to work from bed all day every day. Don’t ignore your body and your brain’s needs. Don’t skip meals. It’s okay to take a break and step away from your desk, but above all, don’t be too hard on yourself.

    Sara Safavi: So I don’t know if we have time for Q?A. I would love to take questions if I can, but otherwise that’s my contact info. I would love to hear from any and all of you.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: That was great. Thank you so much. We’re definitely going to take questions later, like Angie mentioned, but thank you so much. All right, next up… Barb is a software engineering manager and developer on the applications team at Planet. Take it away, Barb. Welcome.

    Barbara Vazquez: Thank you. Hey, everybody. My name is Barbara Vasquez. I go by Barb and I’m a software engineering manager and developer, as well, at Planet. A little bit about myself, I was born and raised in Puerto Rico. I have been working in the geospatial industry as a software engineer since 2008, when I moved to the DC area. And I have been living right now, I’m in Maryland, but I’ve been in the DC area since then. I joined planet about three years ago in 2017. And I’m part of the web applications team. We build some of the tools that help people have easier access toward data.

    Barbara Vazquez: The main thing that, if you’re familiar with Planet, is an application called Planet Explorer. If not, go check it out, planet.com Explorer. Now what I’m going to talk about today, it’s about Agile Development and estimation. It’s mostly focused because I’m a software engineer and we do Agile Development at Planet. And these are some tips and things that might be useful for people doing Agile. Even if you’re not doing Agile, thinking about estimation and how much something will take you to do is useful on a day to day. But with further ado, if you’ve done Agile Development and you do the daily scrums or the daily meetings, you’ve had these thoughts, what are points?

    Barbara Vazquez: Why are people asking me so many questions so many times, when will it be done? Why do I have to give status every day? And it can get tiresome. And you might just want to flip the table and say, this is not what I signed up for. This is not why I want to do software engineering. But through the years, I’ve learned that it can work in your favor. It can actually help you be more organized and communicate better, to have less stress.

    Barbara Vazquez: So estimating with points, if you’re not familiar with Agile or Points. Points is a system that tells people, mostly managers, how difficult do you think a thing is and how long it will take you. But in my perspective, yes, that’s one benefit, to tell your manager when things will get done, but it will help you be honest with yourself.

    Barbara Vazquez: Can I really do this? Is two weeks enough? Or however long you have to develop something. That doing the mental exercise will get you in a better spot where you might not need to pull all nighters. If you have to work weekends to meet your deliverables, you’re probably signing up for too much. Or you might be underestimating what is being asked from you.

    Barbara Vazquez: In Agile, the way it works, you sign up for work and you have X weeks to do something. I’ll use our example. We do two weeks of development. If after those two weeks, every time you’re rolling over things, rolling over means that you did not complete it. That means something is wrong in the process. It’s not necessarily you. It’s a team thing. It’s being underestimated.

    Barbara Vazquez: Scope creep happens. You’re midway. You’re almost done. And then somebody is like, did you think about this? What about you do that? And you go on a tangent and you forget about your original goalpost, or the biggest one that nobody wants to admit is you probably don’t have enough information, but how do you tell your manager that you don’t have enough information?

    Barbara Vazquez: Shouldn’t you be able to do it on your own? Not really. That’s what the whole point of Agile and team development should be. And points are there to help you communicate that.

    Barbara Vazquez: How to start doing better estimates. One thing I do with my team is ignore numbers. Just give me T-shirt sizes, small, medium, large, or extra large. Extra large, can I do this in two weeks? If it’s an extra large, no. It probably needs to be broken apart. You probably need to talk more about it. A large size, will probably take me the two weeks. I’m threading there on borderline not completing it, but let’s give it a shot and let’s see how it goes. Medium, I can get this done. I don’t know how long it will take me. It’s definitely going to be more than a day but I can get it done. And small is I can do this with my eyes closed. It doesn’t matter.

    Barbara Vazquez: That’s my rule of thumb. When I go to do estimates, it’s give me a sense, how do you feel this is so that we can have that conversation of how long it will take. As soon as you do this mental exercise, you’ll get in a better habit and you’ll start recognizing better. I don’t have enough information or this is super easy. Why am I even thinking about it? Let’s get it done.

    Barbara Vazquez: So once you get the T-shirt sizes down, you can map this to whatever point system your team uses if that’s the preferred methodology. A lot of people use the Fibonacci sequence where it’s one, two, three, five, up to 13, where a 13 is the extra large equivalent.

    Barbara Vazquez: So this once you get used to, and you’re like being able to do t-shirt sizes, you can move up to doing the point systems. In any case, even if you don’t do Agile, thinking about your tasks in t-shirt sizes can help you think about difficulty, can help you keep yourself organized and just do that mental exercise of what do you need to get done that week?

    Barbara Vazquez: The other point, two points, no pun intended, is keeping your other responsibilities. Add some buffer. You might be able to sign up, just keeping with the example, two medium things, because life happens. Add some buffer, COVID has taught us that life is unpredictable and your normal cadence is not the same anymore. Distractions happen, you might have family at home. Take that into consideration as well when you’re doing these estimates.

    Barbara Vazquez: And the other point, the other thing to think about with points is it helps you negotiate. It helps you make sure priorities are clear of what needs to be done first versus what needs to be done later. If your plate is full, whether it’s with actual tasking, if it’s with life, use the points to help you drive conversations. I can only do so many mediums stories. If I sign up for one more, I will definitely roll it over because that’s what I’ve learned.

    Barbara Vazquez: And in the end, having slightly more predictable cadence is valuable for everybody. And again, I say slightly because life happens and we cannot be 100% predictable, but we can get there. And that’s all I have. Thank you everybody. I know we don’t have time for Q and A, but that’s my email, barb@planet.com. If you want to reach out or we can talk later.

    Angie Chang: Awesome. Thank you, Barb. That was really great. I’m going to find Kelsey. Video, it’s perfect. Great. We can see you. So Kelsey is a space systems engineer at Planet. Welcome, Kelsey.

    Kelsey Doerksen: Thank you. Perfect. So good evening, everyone. My name is Kelsey Doerksen and I am a space systems engineer at Planet. I started about four weeks before work from home was an order for the San Francisco office. So I got only a little taste of what it was like to work in the physical San Francisco office, but I’m really happy with my past five months being a part of the team.

    Kelsey Doerksen: And today I’m going to be talking a little bit about how to handle big data in space and the different machine learning projects I’ve been a part of over the past few years. And so I’m just going to jump right into it. So first I wanted to start off with what is machine learning and what do I really mean by big data?

    Kelsey Doerksen: So big data is really just that, it’s a large volume of data or a lot of data. And we use machine learning with this big data to seek statistical patterns, to enable computers and algorithms to make either a classification, such as differing between pictures of dogs and cats, or prediction about the data.

    Kelsey Doerksen: I really like this three step image here that basically breaks down what machine learning is really at a high level, where you start with this big conglomerate of data, you can’t really make sense of it or extract any meaningful information from it. You apply analytics to it. And in this case it would be a machine learning algorithm. And from those analytics, you’re able to make informed decisions about the data in question.

    Kelsey Doerksen: I’m going to be talking about three different projects I’ve worked on at a very high level. Don’t be worried if you don’t know anything about machine learning. And I’m going to start off with my first project I worked on, which has to do with machine learning on Mars.

    Kelsey Doerksen: For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Mars exploration Rover mission, this was a NASA mission that launched in 2003, and it sent two twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, to the surface of Mars. Unfortunately for the Spirit Rover, its wheel actually got stuck in the Martian soil. You can see in that black and white gif image there that is taken from the Spirit Rover itself. And unfortunately the mission was lost in 2010 for the Spirit Rover because its wheel was stuck in the sand and they weren’t able to get it free.

    Kelsey Doerksen: How could we have used machine learning in order to prevent this from happening for future Mars Rover missions? As we know, Perseverance is launching, hopefully soon, barring any delays. This is a project I worked on at the NASA jet propulsion lab called the Barefoot Rover project. Essentially what the Barefoot Rover project purpose was, was to use what is physically felt by the Mars Rover wheels, to be able to detect different things about the surface it was rolling across of.

    Kelsey Doerksen: My work was specific to making sure the wheels were not slipping or sinking into the different types of sand material we had at the JPL campus. And it was also, I worked on the terrain classification and detecting if there’s any subsurface rocks that could possibly penetrate the wheel and cause damage to the wheels.

    Kelsey Doerksen: How this worked from a machine learning perspective at a very high level, essentially what we had was a yellow pressure pad wrapped around the outside of the Mars Rover wheel. And we took those pressure pad readings and trained that in a classifier to be able to detect these things that are on the bottom of the slide there. So we were able to tell the hydration content of the soil, anomaly detection, safety, and stability of the Rover, slip and sinkage, which is what I worked on, terrain classification, rock detection, and other different tear mechanical properties.

    Kelsey Doerksen: This is a really cool project I worked on and it’s going to be implemented on future Mars Rover missions. The second project I’ll talk about is machine learning for the sun and for our Earth atmosphere. So this very terrifying image you see on the slide here is a picture of a Coronal Mass Ejection event. What a Coronal Mass Ejection event is, is a huge explosion on the surface of the sun.

    Kelsey Doerksen: And essentially what happens is these huge explosions send out high energy particles into space. You can see there, Earth is to scale in terms of the size of a Coronal Mass Ejection and the sun as compared to the size of our Earth. The distance is not to scale, but the size of the two planetary bodies is. So why this is of concern other than the fear that it strikes of course from this image, don’t worry. It’s not going to cause any … The flames will not reach our surface. But what they do do is send these high energy particles to our Earth’s atmosphere that essentially push our satellites around. So from a satellite operator perspective, the satellites can actually be moved off of their orbit path and collide with other objects in space, which is obviously really detrimental to the satellite operators.

    Kelsey Doerksen: How can we use machine learning to tackle this sort of problem? Well, we can’t stop these Coronal Mass Ejection events from happening, pictured there is a gif image from the Soho telescope that is showing what a Coronal Mass Ejection looks like. So we can’t stop these huge events from happening, but we can at least try to learn as much as possible about them and how they are affecting our satellite. And this was my master’s thesis work using the satellite accelerometer data to detect these solar storms. So I mentioned before that these solar storms send out huge amounts of high energy particles and they reach our Earth’s atmosphere. The way you can think about this is if you’re walking outside and it’s very, very windy and you’re getting blown back by the wind, that’s kind of is what’s happening to our satellites when these particles reach our atmosphere.

    Kelsey Doerksen: And that can be captured in the satellite acceleration data. The two graphs I have pictured on the slide here, the top graph, it shows the acceleration of the satellite when there’s solar storm happening. So you can see the signal is quite erratic and it’s actually doubles and above in the linear acceleration of the satellite itself. Whereas during a period, when there is no sort of solar storm, the satellite is very periodic and the signal isn’t fluctuating at any alarming rates.

    Kelsey Doerksen: The last project I worked on and want to introduce is, of course, using Planet data, and this is machine learning for our Earth. So I’m really happy to be a part of the new partnership with the Frontier Development Lab and Planet, which is an eight week research sprint with the NASA and SETI Institute, and Planet is working with the Waters of the United States team, which is using Planet’s daily imagery with machine learning, to assist with drought detection and prediction in small streams in the continental United States.

    Kelsey Doerksen: Pictured here is the Seminole reservoir in Wyoming, United States. And the first signs of droughts can be identified in the small streams that branch off of large bodies of water like these. So by comparing pixel values in these streams using Planet’s daily imagery of sites, similar to this, the team of researchers will be able to detect and predict future droughts across America with the aim to scale this work to other areas across the globe.

    Kelsey Doerksen: I can’t get to my … There we go. I really hope you were interested and able to follow along with those three different projects I worked on. I think machine learning, it’s such a new and growing field and space is the perfect application for machine learning because we have so much data. And if you have any questions, you can feel free to reach out to me, and thanks very much for your time.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: That was excellent. Kelsey, are you seeing the comments? Awesome, Kelsey [crosstalk].

    Kelsey Doerksen: I can’t see them, but thanks a lot.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Someone said I want to be all the speakers. That was just amazing. I learned so much. So moving on to our next speaker, Deanna. Deanna leads the team at Planet responsible for operating and maintaining the over a hundred imaging satellites, or Doves, currently on orbit. Welcome, Deanna.

    Deanna Farago: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here. This is my first Girl Geek event. I’m excited also just to hear from other Planeteers because, sadly, it’s a large enough company that you don’t automatically know everyone. I love hearing everyone else’s stories, as well. All right, so I will present. Hopefully everyone can see that okay.

    Deanna Farago: All right, as I mentioned, my name is Deanna Farago and my team and I operate a fleet of satellites that are currently imaging the entire planet every day. And, traditionally, satellite operations can be very time and resource intensive. For example, in order to operate one spacecraft, you could have a room full of engineers around the clock, 24/7 monitoring, telemetry and contacts, and just system performance.

    Deanna Farago: And our satellites operate in a different paradigm and risk posture. This has allowed us to be able to automate a lot of the operations. Even before COVID, we could operate essentially anywhere as long as we had a good internet connection and our laptop. Before I describe what that looks like, it’s important to understand what the mission is and the scale of our operations.

    Deanna Farago: Our company’s mission one is to image the entire planet every day. And you need a lot of satellites in order to do that. And we actually, in addition to operating satellites, we design, build, and test all of our satellites in house. And this is a big advantage for us as operators, because if and when we run into issues on orbit, we can work directly with the engineers that designed the satellite in order to troubleshoot the problems and help come up with on orbit mitigations, as well as design out these bugs/features in the next spacecraft iteration.

    Deanna Farago: And then once in space, we use just a little bit of atmosphere that we have to use something called differential drag to space out the satellites over time. And as one satellite images over a strip of land, the one right after it should image this strip of land, just adjacent to it. And this essentially creates alliance scanner. What you’re seeing here is a 24 hour snapshot of what the imaging strips could look like that the satellites are capturing. And we have a distributed team operating our satellites. We have four people in San Francisco, one person in Toronto, and a team of four in Berlin. And we send tasks to the ground stations, which then send the schedules up to the satellites. And just a fun fact for this group that at Planet, we have three satellite operations teams and they’re all managed by women.

    Deanna Farago: The concept of operations is actually quite simple for these Doves. We don’t image over the ocean. We only image over the land, but basically anytime they’re overland, they just point down, take pictures. If they’re over ground stations, we downlink those pictures in logs and we communicate with them. And then in the background we’ll just run maintenance activities, essentially thinking of them as like tuneups and checking in on like subsystems and keeping an eye on any degradation that might be happening or running experiments. And, in theory, if the satellites are performing well, they should just be as easy as this man’s rotisserie grill, where we just set it and forget it. We can even run it custom experiments, and we set up the tasks and not have to worry about it.

    Deanna Farago: However, things don’t always go smooth. There’s a lot of fires that can happen. And that’s kind of how we know we’ll never really be able to automate ourselves out of a job. These are just some examples of issues that we’ve seen on our satellites. So a satellite suddenly starts spinning up, and we have to figure out why is it spinning up? And we need to de tumble it. We noticed that the satellites have low battery, that’s voltage, and we need to take action before they start browning out and rebooting rapidly. We see that telemetry sensors are reading zero value. Is this a real thing? Or is the sensor it just being faulty? And we have to reset it. Or sometimes satellites just are unresponsive out of the blue and we have to spend time to figure out, did something change, did something break on the satellite?

    Deanna Farago: Or can we just set up some automation to keep an eye on it? And all of these actions started out as manual. We would detect these problems and then operators would spend time triaging it and then eventually taking action. And now our teams have automated responses to all of these so that they trigger off of just telemetry on the satellite. As soon our automation sees like the driver readings are reading up. Then we know the … Sorry, the robot just basically sends a task to respond to this, so an operator doesn’t actually have to. And this decreases latency in the system and gets the satellite back into production as quickly as possible. And there’s always going to be unknown unknowns, and we’re constantly trying to find these new problems and automating responses to it.

    Deanna Farago: What does a day in the life of an operator? Well, we work nine to five and we have a checklist that we rotate among the team members. This enables our team to be able to have weekend or holiday coverage. Even though we’re working normal office hours, we want to make sure that there’s always going to be satellite operators, eyes on the system every day. And for this number of satellites, we have to aggregate our data. Aggregating our data is key. What that means is we build lots of dashboards based off of our telemetry, and off of our logs from the satellite. And it allows us to be able to easily see if there’s any satellites that are responding and acting out of family. And that will then trigger an operator to say this one’s not behaving the same as its fellow satellites. I’m going to dig in further and try to triage it.

    Deanna Farago: We have weekday team standups and we’re supported by amazing other teams in mission control. And those teams also have their own on-call. And so if something does break in the middle of the night, that affects the whole fleet. Those teams help support us. I wanted to show this because it’s one of my favorite things that we’ve taken a picture of at Planet. And it’s actually a series of pictures that we stitched together into a video. And just before a rocket launch, we’re able to opportunistically schedule a Dove to take a series of images of a rocket delivering more Doves to space. Just a real quick cool shot. And that’s shot by one of our satellites. So very cool. And then sadly, we won’t be doing any missed high fives and hugs and mission control in person anytime soon, like our former coworker here Rob Zimmerman. But we can still enjoy having first contacts and commissioning with one another virtually. And this is our, I guess, equivalent version of that from a few years ago when we were able to successfully make contact with 88 satellites right after launch. And with that, that’s all I really wanted to share. I couldn’t go into too much detail, but I’m happy to answer questions. If you’d like to email me. I am at deanna@planet.com. Thank you for having me.

    Angie Chang: Thank you, Deanna. That’s really awesome. And you … Let’s see. And now we are going to bring up Elena, who has over two decades of experience in sales and she’ll be telling us her journey.

    Elena Rodriguez: Excellent. Good evening, everyone. I’m so happy for this invitation. I just joined Planet three months ago and I really wanted to talk about … sorry, this is my first time, I wanted to talk about the adventure of making a decision, how important it is for our career. But first, let me introduce what I do here at Planet.

    Elena Rodriguez: As I said, I joined the company three months ago, I’m this salesperson for Mexico, Central America, Ecuador, and the Caribbean. I have been in the business for more than 20 years, and I am so, so honored to be part of the Planet team. I’m so happy and so proud of working for the company that is offering solutions that are critical to mitigate some of the main challenges that we are facing right now, like climate change, food crisis, fighting poverty, so many applications, and I feel so proud to talk about our business when I go out there and meet my clients and listeners. So I chose a topic because this is something that I’ve been always thinking about it. And now I have the opportunity to talk about it. And I’m going to take advantage of this — is how I ended up here. I want to show you my story.

    Elena Rodriguez: Ever since I started back in the 80s, I have all the dreams like I wanted to be a fashion designer, because that’s something that I really enjoy since I was a little girl. And I took … but it was difficult for me because fashion was a very expensive career in Venezuela, and I had a scholarship, and I moved to Seattle from Venezuela to study sales and advertising. I have no choice. So let me tell you that, that was the first time I didn’t make any decisions.

    Elena Rodriguez: I had to choose what I thought was available for me that time. So I remember my sales teacher, Mr. Fine, it’s impossible to forget him. That he was always saying that a good sales person is capable of selling anything anything. Selling water to a fish. I wasn’t growing that idea of on my mind, but I was thinking, I don’t know if I’m really right for this career, sales is like — I don’t know — However, I was already thinking like when I was a little girl, I was drawing paper dolls and I was selling those to my friends at school. I was making bracelets with the colorful telephone wires, and I was selling those. I was a sales person already!

    Elena Rodriguez: I went back to Venezuela and I graduated, but I was still thinking, I don’t know what I want to do, this is my passion. I want to be a fashion designer. And it took me four years to graduate. It was the beginning of this career in Venezuela. And it was a lot of work. It was very expensive. There were times that I couldn’t sleep, doing all the drawings, the designs, and making all these dresses, this yellow one, and the one along here, I made them. And I was so inspired, because that’s exactly what I wanted to do.

    Elena Rodriguez: But then something funny happened during this practice — is that every time my friends called me and asked me for a dress, because they chose the fabrics, I have my [inaudible] they chose what they liked. And I made the dresses. Then when they came home to pick them up, I didn’t want to sell them! I was like no, I keep them. So I decided that’s not for me.

    Elena Rodriguez: It took me a while and I was thinking, you know [inaudible] what am I going to do? We are almost through this and I need to make a decision. I needeed to plan because I had a strong pressure from society, my country, and I made a decision — I thought it was time for me to have a family. And that was a decision that really, I thought about it a lot, because I know what it meant for me at the time — that I had to give up some things that were important for some time.

    Elena Rodriguez: But those changes, I always ask myself — once I start with passion to adapt to a new reality, because I had that question on my mind. And the answer is definitely no, I was just growing up. And it was time for me to make that decision and get prepared and be responsible for the decision that I have made.

    Elena Rodriguez: In 1995, it was a huge revolution in Venezuela because that’s when Internet arrived to our country. It was the time also when my boy was born, he’s 25 right now. And I remember I was taking care of my son and I was hearing all this noise outside — my husband and his friends talking about Internet — let’s go, let’s navigate, let’s check — They were looking for some topics and they were celebrating and I was feeding my baby and I was thinking, Oh my gosh, I think I’m losing something, something’s happening here, and I don’t know, I don’t want to sound selfish, but I had that on my mind. You know, so what am I going to do with technology, but I don’t know if I can even think about that! Would I ever touch a computer again? I had all these questions at that time. [inaudible] years things turn to be kind of difficult in my country. And I had to work. I had to live outside definitely my [inaudible]. And I had to go outside and find a different job, something because I needed to bring money to… because I had a family and things were difficult, and I was ready to get back on track, but I wasn’t ready for the technology. I had missed one year of all these changes! So selling was becoming more challenging, new terminologies, services, a new way of communicating… communication skills.

    Elena Rodriguez: The first job I got out there was for selling ads for the magazine called Computerworld with names like Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, and those that were never familiar to me — it started to be new and that was nice — I was into a completely different world. This job was the one that allowed me to meet the people that helped me, that guided me, that inspired me to be in this field. And to be honest, selling was never had never been so much gratifying for me.

    Elena Rodriguez: Five years later, I had to make a very difficult decision that by the way, this week when I was practicing this presentation I found out how, I mean, how your country, your family, your culture really touched you. And I was like, I didn’t realize before, it’s like I was keeping that into myself, but it was a big decision. It wasn’t something that I was prepared for, but that was the time where the political situation in my country was unsustainable and started to be not sustainable even worse. I had a job offer in Mexico and I didn’t think twice. I moved here. And as you can see, the picture was… I think that was my first week here in Mexico. And you can see all the disaster. And remember I was asking if I would ever touch a computer again.

    Elena Rodriguez: Well, here is a computer, but I was only able to touch it because it was impossible to carry, so heavy. Everything has been changed as we know, that’s funny. So that’s when I started. It was like, for me, that was my own revolution, geospatial, learning new terminologies. It was such an exciting world. I was working with geographers, engineers, and so many people that I met in the industry. I really was in love with this new market. I was, like, wow. And I’m very proud because I participated in the first high-resolution satellite sale to the Mexican government. And I had all these questions from people. I mean, what is that you do? Are you a spy? What is it and that was very funny. But every time I had more challenges, it was time for me to learn more.

    Elena Rodriguez: And that’s really… That was very interesting. I don’t regret. I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years now. I still live in Mexico. I’ve met such interesting people, nice people, being in this environment. And I feel the pride to sell something, that I know that it’s going to go there to help people, to make people make good decisions. And this is something I feel so proud about it. And I’m here. This is what I do now. The geospatial world got me. I’ve been doing this work for, as I said, for more than 20 years, I’ve been in the drones industry, as well. I learned how to fly the drone. I was so proud about it. This picture here — in the mining, it was something very scary because I was in Peru and I had to sleep there. So, many nice adventures. I am so happy that I got… That I decided to stay here. I don’t [inaudible] change from fashion designing to the geospatial world. I can always be creative and I use the fashion designing for myself. So I like clothes. I like that. I mean, that’s inevitable. I can’t leave that behind, but this is, the right decisions brought me here. No regrets how I did it. I don’t know.

    Elena Rodriguez: As you see, sometimes we need to do what we need to do. I’ve been humble. I know that I’m not an expert. I’ve been learning and I always learn. It’s very challenging, this work. I rely on those experts that are willing to teach me and I take that very seriously. I understood that there are ways, many interesting ways to explore different options. I learned that we have to capitalize the knowledge because after you invest so much time in learning about something, changing probably is not such a good idea.

    Elena Rodriguez: Well, I don’t want to discourage the people that are doing this, but for me, I said, no, this is what I’ve learned, took me a long time. I want to be here. I wanted to be… to decide to be part of the change was very… That’s something that really pushed me as well. So that keeps me investigating and asking. So I’m curious about the technology and especially about the things that I do. Every time I made the decision, of course, I had to ask myself how it was going to benefit or affect my loved ones and understanding that it’s not always about me, that I have to care for my family. The company that I work for, there’s a world outside.

    Elena Rodriguez: I have faith in people. Trust me, I believe in people. I think we can always… We are a big team and I have a real engagement for environment. And I don’t know, I take care of my garden, my little dog, and I actually care about that. And, well, that’s it. Thank you. I think we don’t have time for questions. Thank you for listening.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you so much, Elena. That was amazing. We learned so much from you. So our next speaker is Sarah Preston. Sarah is a marketing manager at Planet Labs, exploring how to use space-based imagery to improve life on Earth. Just pulling Sarah up. Hi, Sarah, how’s it going, right in front of the Golden Gate Bridge?

    Sarah Preston: Thanks. Out here in San Francisco. You can hear me alright, right?

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Mm-hmm (affirmative), Yeah. So, welcome.

    Sarah Preston: Okay. So I’m going to share my screen and… Okay, can you all see that?

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yep.

    Sarah Preston: Okay, great. Thanks. Yeah, my name is Sarah Preston. I’m a product marketing manager at Planet. Now, a product marketing manager… Product marketing can mean a lot of different things in a lot of different organizations. But what I do is I work across our product and our marketing team and our sales teams to really find the right fit for our imagery and to understand what our prospects and what our audiences need out of imagery, even if they don’t know it yet. As you can imagine, narratives are extremely important part of what I do. So, I’m super excited to be here with you all to geek out about data-driven storytelling.

    Sarah Preston: Okay. First, why do we tell stories in the first place? Stories are paths to community and understanding. Think about all the stories that you loved growing up. There was some kind of connection that you made, either to a character, to the author, or to the setting that drew you in and made it really memorable. You joined that community that was telling that story. And within that story, whether it’s fact or fiction, there was information, and you got to learn from others in that community and to build an understanding about the world around you.

    Sarah Preston: What is a good story? So, “a good story is driven by emotion and balanced by fact.” That’s one of my favorite quotes, actually, that I heard. I can’t claim ownership of it, but, really, when we listen to a great story and we create a connection to a story, we’re really feeling some emotion and emotions can be extremely powerful motivators. I think, in or outside of the workplace even, an emotion can be excitement. It can be fear. It can be confusion. It can be ambition, but also a very human desire to understand the world around us. Emotions, they get us engaged in a story and interested. But facts and data, they keep us grounded.

    Sarah Preston: As an example of how you might be able to see this, Planet took this image of Pripyat, Ukraine back in April. Now this was when Pripyat was experiencing massive wildfires and this was right outside of the Chernobyl exclusion zone that you can see in the center there. It was an extremely dangerous time, already a dangerous area. Radiation levels had spiked 16 times more than usual and Ukranian officials were telling the world, basically, that these fires had been controlled, extinguished. Clearly not the case. Now hearing this, when we talk about emotions, hearing this story in the news, you can’t help but feel a sense of fear, maybe helplessness and anxiety, and all these emotions that are driving, maybe not necessarily the international community, but driving officials to understand what is happening. How can we solve it? Well, Planet came in and we captured this image and this image has a lot of data in it to help move these decisions forward, to help these move and capture these emotions.

    Sarah Preston: When we look at this image, we can see where the smoke is drifting. That tells us where the wildfire might be spreading to. We can see how far the wildfire has already spread on a grander scale. We can see how close it is to the Chernobyl exclusion zone. How radiation levels might continue to increase. And it tells us a lot about where we can deploy resources and where we can deploy flame retardant and, at the same time, keep all of our first responders safe. We had these emotions that we were feeling at the beginning, and a really good way to think about it is: Emotions, they move us forward. They encourage us to do something, but facts and data, they move us forward in the right direction. They give us an idea or an insight about where to go.

    Sarah Preston: How do we craft great stories? Great stories is really about taking our audience or, on a business scale, our prospects, on a journey from ignorance to understanding. Now, there are not three key points to creating a great story. This could be an hour long seminar and I’ve been to them before. It’s such a fascinating subject, but, given the time we have, I narrowed it down to three points that I think are really important.

    Sarah Preston: Know your audience. You want to understand what are their motivations? What are their expectations? Maybe what do they feel themselves on a daily basis? What’s their vocabulary? How do they communicate with each other and interact with the rest of the world? You want to really clarify the problem. Every story has its key conflict. You want to understand: what exactly is the conflict of the story you’re building and what is driving it, whether that is the emotions. And then you want to create some insight. What is the data showing us? This is the second half of the storytelling. How do we get past the conflict and use that data to create insight, to move us all forward?

    Sarah Preston: And here is an example, also at Planet, of how we recently used those points to create a broader story. We started work with the New Mexico State Land Office and they were looking to monitor permitting activity in the Permian Basin. You can see that on the right side of the screen, the sample image. And there’s a lot of mining activity out there, but they just couldn’t see in the way they wanted to.

    Sarah Preston: First, what we did here is we had to know your audience, right? We understood, and came to understand, how exactly the office itself functions, how it fits in with the broader civil government. What exactly is their legal mandate, who is our main point of contact and how to best really work with them in the first place. This is knowing how to communicate with them. Now once we know how to communicate with them, we can clarify the problem. Why is the office really experiencing this challenge? Why did they have very poor visibility into the more remote Permian Basin? Well, aerial photography like they’ve tried, was very slow and resource-intensive as was manned surveys. Sending people out there to actually see what’s going on, it was growing expensive. They were growing frustrated, really, that they didn’t really have a good way to monitor this land.

    Sarah Preston: What Planet did was, now that we knew our audience, and we then clarified the problem, we were able to deliver the data to really create a good insight to solve their challenge. This is sample data, again, right here on the right of the screen. We deliver near-daily imagery to them so they can see change and what’s actually happening and activity. And once they see that activity, then they can deploy resources, whether that’s people or anything else to solve that issue.

    Sarah Preston: Before I wrap up, I want to put another little plug. If you’re interested in learning more about storytelling at Planet, we actually have a customer conference coming up in October and we’re going to be featuring customers and partners talking about how they used our imagery for their own storytelling and how they’ve been able to build their own paths to understanding and building their own communities. The reason I want to feature this here is because it’s actually completely free this year and online, so very, very accessible. And before I completely close out, my last point, really, is: We are in a hugely data-driven world, and it’s really not so much about just collecting data anymore. It’s about collecting the right data and really understanding how to use it, how we get insights and go from that, go from that ignorance to that understanding to create solutions and to create great stories around our world. I don’t think I have time for questions, but that is my short brief. Again, this is a topic I could talk about at length, but hopefully you captured something out of this.

    Angie Chang: Great. Thank you so much for that, Sarah, and we are now going to be bringing up Brittany, who is a natural disaster research scientist turned businesswoman.

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    Brittany Zajic: Alright. Thanks, everyone. Hi everyone. Thanks for the opportunity to speak with you all tonight. My name is Brittany Zajic and I’m on the business development team here at Planet. Business development means something different at every company. And here, we focus on strategic partnerships and the commercialization of new markets. I also lead our disaster response operations, which is part of our social impact initiatives, where we provide satellite imagery to first responders and official stakeholders in the event of a large, natural disaster anywhere in the world. And, while not exactly a natural disaster, COVID-19 is very much a global public health crisis reshaping all of our behaviors and our environmental systems. So, today I’m going to talk about how satellite imagery is helping us better understand the impacts of this pandemic.

    Brittany Zajic: By capturing a series of places in different points of time, satellite imagery is able to tell an important story. When millions of people began sheltering in place earlier this year, many looked to Planet, asking how we could help. So, how can satellite imagery help during a pandemic? Tonight I am going to showcase a few of the many applications surrounding the economic and environmental impacts of COVID-19.

    Brittany Zajic: First, we head to Wuhan, China to see the start of their shelter-in-place. In these first two comparisons, we see a stark difference of traffic patterns and these images taken only two weeks apart, with not a single car in sight starting January 28. And I’ll go back one more time. I know this is quick. We then shift to expand further beyond just the limited car transportation, and, instead, think about the closures of factories, construction sites, and all other industrial activities that had a dramatic impact on the air quality in regions of, and parts of, China. Here is a comparison over a portion of Beijing from the start of the year on the left to March 2020 on the right. We then shift to Italy, the next epicenter of COVID-19. Many media outlets spoke of the now quiet canals and the cleaner waters running through the city, which was largely captured in these series of images here. I’ll run through these one more time. This is October 2019, March 2020, February 2020, and March 15th.

    Brittany Zajic: Finally, we have the next epicenter that migrates to the United States, where it continues to remain today. New York was hit hardest and here we can see the construction of a temporary hospital in none other than Central Park, Manhattan, in the heart of New York. The rest of the United States followed suit soon after and shut down as well from the Bay Bridge Toll (that you take from going Oakland to downtown San Francisco) to the decrease in air travel (here’s a Southern California logistics airport — and just to highlight, we can see all the airplanes stacked up, not being in use), to the empty beaches (of Miami, Miami Beach, Florida) and then also the empty parking lots of Disneyworld in Orlando, Florida.

    Brittany Zajic: So, it’s pretty incredible for satellites to be able to so clearly capture this pause on life that has been experienced, that we’ve all been experiencing these past couple of months. Now, there is no question that one data set has been able to tell a great story, but Planet imagery combined with multiple other data sets is going to be able to tell us even more. So I’m going to spend the remainder of this talk today, talking about EOdashboard.org, an international collaboration among space agencies that is central to the success of satellite Earth observation and data analysis.

    Brittany Zajic: The tri-agency COVID-19 Dashboard is a concentrated effort between the European Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency, and NASA. The Dashboard combines the resources, technical knowledge and expertise of these three partner organizations to strengthen our global understanding of the environmental and economic impacts of COVID-19. So, if we remember back to my early example in Venice, Italy, we visually saw the difference of boat traffic and water turbidity. Now, with EOS Dashboard, using information from several different satellites and sensor types, we’re able to turn that visualization into a quantitative assessment and observation, which is incredibly valuable when measuring environmental and economic indicators or factors.

    Brittany Zajic: A second example of these quantitative metrics is the air quality in Beijing. Again, deriving these insights from an entire suite of different satellites, the ability to analyze these trends from space aids the effort to fight and defeat this pandemic. I leave you all with encouraging you to further explore this Dashboard and learn more about how COVID-19 is impacting people all over the world and explore it through the lens of satellite imagery, because together we can defeat this. Thank you.

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi, thank you so much. That was great. Next speaker is Nikki Hampton. Nikki is Planet’s VP of People and Talent, and she would like to share a few words on their commitment to diversity and inclusion. Welcome, Nikki.

    Nikki Hampton: Thank you. I want to thank all the speakers, even though I know all of these women, I learned so much about them and the work they do and how they got to where they are. So, I’m pretty excited about that. I mostly wanted to say that at Planet, we have always been committed to diversity, but we are doubling down on our commitment and particularly so, looking with respect to attracting and retaining communities of color. And for all of you online, we are looking forward to and eager to work with you, to tap into a broader network of talented folks that you might want to consider referring to us or applying and sharing with whom you know, but we’re super excited to have been part of this and are grateful that you all attended.

    Angie Chang: Thank you so much for that, Nikki. Now we’re going to just move into the Q&A. If there are a few questions, I think we have literally like five minutes till 8:00 PM when we kick off networking. So, if you have any questions, please ask them in the Q&A section and we will be sharing them with Planet and you’ll be getting a follow-up email with job links. They are hiring for some positions like senior corporate counsel, systems engineer, software engineer, account executives. So, you can be like Elena. Sales development reps, customer success managers, and more, and the job links are usually in our Girl Geek X Planet emails that you’re receiving. So, just scroll down and click on those links or forward it to a friend who is looking for a new role.

    Angie Chang: We will be heading over to our networking hour at 8:00 PM. It is on a platform called icebreaker.video and you will have the link in your email, if you look in your email, or we can put it in this chat and we’ll be doing some facilitated one-on-one networking where you literally meet one-on-one with people in a non-Zoom environment. It’s going to be a little more fun and you actually get to talk to people and see their faces. So, if you can hop-

    Sukrutha Bhadouria: And I wanted to call out, thank you so much to everybody speaking and thanks to everybody who has been commenting. I definitely see that it has been super valuable for you all. I wanted to mention, because I’ve also been getting asked, how you can get your company to partner with us to do a virtual Girl Geek Dinner. Definitely reach out to us, through the website, sponsor@girlgeek.io — that’s our email — and if you want to reach out individually to Angie or I, our emails are listed on the website as well. The other thing I wanted to say is, if you do get your company to sponsor, you must sign up to be one of the speakers, own it, use the stage that you are creating for everyone else to promote yourself as well. So, that’s all I had.

    Angie Chang: Great. So thank you all for being so good at the chat, and we’ll see you over at icebreaker.video so we can chat one-on-one with everyone. Thank you all and we’ll see you there. We’re going to keep this on so people can see the link and click on it — and hopefully we’ll rejoin and see you over there in a minute. Alright, bye.

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“Jumpstarting Your ML Journey in Cyber Security”: Melisa Napoles with Splunk (Video + Transcript)

Transcript of Elevate 2020 Session

Sukrutha Bhadouria: All right. Up next, Melisa Napoles, we’re so excited to have, will be our next speaker. She’s a solutions engineer at Splunk, where she helps customers solve interesting data problems in security operations, as well as in business intelligence. Melisa will now be sharing with us her favorite lessons learned from organizations that jumpstart their machine learning journeys in cyber security. Welcome, Melisa, and thank you so much for making time for us.

Melisa Napoles: Excellent. All right, I’m going to go ahead and share my screen. All right. Can you confirm you guys see my screen all right?

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Yes, we can see your screen.

Melisa Napoles: Excellent. Well, hi everyone. Thank you for those of you who are still on with us, and hello to those of you who are just now tuning in. For the next 15 minutes or so, we’re going to hopefully get you all out of here having jump-started or substantiating your knowledge around doing machine learning and cyber security.

Melisa Napoles: All right. Here’s what I have for our agenda the next 15 minutes. When I think about jump-starting this journey and I think about all the clients I’ve worked with, it feels natural to me to segment the conversation in these four areas. Before jumping right into it, though, I’m going to take just a moment to tell you a little bit about me so you can put some history with the face on the other side of the screen here with you.

Melisa Napoles: I moved around a lot growing up, and this slide just talks about what makes me me. As my company likes to call it, these are my million data points. My family immigrated to the United States from Cuba, so I am first generation born American. After graduating from school and having various internships and consulting experience, technical specialist experience, sales engineering experience, I landed myself at a big data company called Splunk. I currently live out of Chicago, Illinois, supporting some of our larger Splunk customers, but my heart is somewhere between Miami, Florida and Seattle Washington, where I have my family. They say that your home is where the heart is, right? That’s a bit about my situation.

Melisa Napoles: And what being a solutions engineer really means is that I’m sort of like a consultant with Splunk solutions and everything Splunk touches, which is a lot of things. Splunk got its initial start in IT and security, but it’s since translated into a platform that serves almost every business unit in an organization. And the reason that’s cool is it’s allowed me to be exposed to how businesses run their practices, in particular, their cyber security practices. And so from this work over the last five years now, there are certainly patterns that have emerged to show what really good looks like in a cyber security practice, embarking on machine learning and what not so good looks like and some of the things that cause organizations to stalemate and not be able to move forward. In this particular visual, something that I’m particularly proud of in working here at Splunk is we just have absolutely stellar, quality female engineers, and I’m thankful to have that support system around me.

Melisa Napoles: All right, so let’s jump right into it. When I first started working in this space, it took me a good long while to really get the gist of AI and ML, and I went to school for physics and I took a lot of math classes. I was pretty much forced to figure it out because of the clients I was working with and the questions they were asking me that ultimately I was also asking. And what I learned is that for starters, ML, or machine learning, is a subset of AI or artificial intelligence, to put it simply. AI is the broader concept of machines being able to carry out tasks in a way that we would consider smart, and ML is an application of AI based around giving machines access to data to make some decisions on their own. It’s really not as scary as people make it seem. And when we’re talking about cyber security in particular, I’m finding that many organizations are really still in the realm of the machine learning area, at least today.

Melisa Napoles: When I embarked on this journey a few years ago, I also ran into asking, “Well, is machine learning statistics or is it not?” And even to this day, I get organizations asking me this, trying to understand this on their own, too. And what I’ve learned is that machine learning is very much based off statistics. And the main difference between them is their purpose. All ML certainly uses statistics, but not all statistics can necessarily be classified as machine learning. Statistic models are designed to make inferences about the relationships between data variables themselves and the machine learning models are designed to make the most accurate prediction off those inferences. It seems like everyone has an opinion about this these days, but this is the best conclusion I’ve come to, at least to date. We’ll see how long it lasts for, but this seems to be working in separating my logic in this space.

Melisa Napoles: And of course, like all good things, there are also lots of opinions on this sort of thing that you see quoted here as well. There’s comedy as a part of this quote, but I do find this to be true. At a very practical level, what ML typically represents when an organization is first starting out is in fact basic statistics. And right, this is just the thing that we all learn about in the mandatory high school or college stats class that we were forced to take.

Melisa Napoles: And so with all the buzz around machine learning and AI in the industry, you’d think everyone is doing it. Right? But what’s surprising is that organizations are not. And for those who are doing it, they’re running into major issues that effectively put a brick wall in front of them. And it’s really hard to get over. Oftentimes, I work on projects where a good number of organizations do, in fact, feel like this is all hype because they don’t know where to start or they got started too quickly and didn’t understand some of the foundational pieces to having longevity in this space, but it’s definitely not all hype.

Melisa Napoles: And so the way that I think about working with any data is like this. Everything we ever do with data for the most part can route back to a question we are trying to answer, a question that is formulated by our brains that we are trying to answer. And oftentimes those questions, if not all the time, can be categorized as your known knowns, the questions you know you need to be asking and in which you have confidence in how to find the answers, your known unknowns, the questions, again, you know you need to be asking, but you really are not very confident how to go about finding those answers and your unknown unknowns, the questions you don’t even know to be asking and you definitely don’t know the answers. Most organizations implementing machine learning and cyber security live in the first two spaces here, your known knowns and your known unknowns. Only the ones with extremely good resourcing can also say they’re incorporating the unknown unknowns, and we’ll talk about why that is.

Melisa Napoles: All right, so I’m going to give you just a moment here to see if you can count the number of bears on this visual. If any of you have played Where’s Waldo before, this as much the same. ML can help you reduce noise and look for the things you care about, the known unknowns, “I know I need to be asking about this, but I’m not really sure what the answer is or how to come about it.” Because we’re short on time, I’m going to jump to the next screen, and there they are. There are four bears, but that was a lot of noise to sort through, right?

Melisa Napoles: And keep in mind that I told you, you were looking for bears. What if you didn’t know to look for bears? What if you didn’t know they were representative of something you cared about? Because you knew to look for the bears, this was a known known. You knew the bears were what you cared about, so now where are they? Let me count them. Had you not known you were looking for bears, this would have been a known unknown, “I don’t know what’s anomalous here, but I know something likely is. Let me look for similarities and dissimilarities to find it.” You may ask why we used bears here and not just a Where’s Waldo visual. Fancy Bear is a Russian cyber espionage group. They target government, military, and security organizations, so think NATO and the like, and they try to steal secrets, hence finding your Fancy Bears.



Melisa Napoles: And it’s easy to get overwhelmed with where to start with ML and cyber security or really ML in any practice, and you don’t have to be doing the most advanced things with ML to be getting incredible value. Go after, and what I often advise organizations, and the most successful ones, what I see them doing is going after what the industry likes to call low-hanging fruit. Go after the low complexity, high benefit use cases. What’s in the upper right hand quadrant here is representative of where I see organizations first implementing machine learning and where they’re very successful. When you see things like malware detection or intrusion detection, think about asking questions like, “Do I have employees visiting weird websites that have long complex URLs that are sort of unrecognizable and are not indicative of something normal? And if they are, how often do they do it? Are they doing it more than they normally do? And how do I even define what normal is? Is it no times and they’ve been there the first time? Is it more than five times?” Understanding what that normal is, is where machine learning is incorporating.

Melisa Napoles: When you see things like … We’ve got here, a variety of things, but even think about asking, “Do I have employees failing to log into their corporate-issued laptop more times than they normally do in a given period?” I’ll take myself in particular. I mean, I fail authentication on my laptop at least five times every single day for a solid week every time Splunk forces me to change my password. It’s just a habit. And with Splunk incorporating machine learning into cyber security practice, they should be able to ask, “Well, when is Melisa failing to authenticate on her laptop way more than she normally does?” So these are some things to think about.

Melisa Napoles: What’s working for organizations and where are they in their AI and ML journey besides what we’ve just talked about in that upper right hand quadrant? Most organizations get started on machine learning or anomaly detection in cyber security with static thresholds. Imagine for a moment that you’re part of a security organization and all that really means is your job is to protect the company from the bad guys and gals doing any variety of things. And you’re tasked with being able to answer, “When do I have employees failing to authenticate more times than they normally do, failing to log in more times than they normally do?” And the first way that organizations tend to answer this question is by saying, “Okay, well, let’s just set some static threshold in place.” In this case, in the visual I’ve got, it’s 100, so any data point where the failed logins are more than 100, I’m going to be notified. But how do I even know if 100 is the right number and if it’s the right number for every individual in my organization?

Melisa Napoles: Oftentimes, while that is an awesome way to start doing machine learning and cyber security in that particular one example, organizations will then often upgrade to incorporating statistics with standard deviation, so then being able to ask, “All right, well, instead of tell me when I’ve got employees failing to authenticate more than 100 times, tell me when I have employees failing to log in more than they normally would.” And so that’s what you see here.

Melisa Napoles: And so organizations will get here. They’ll live here for a while, but as they start to incorporate a larger volume of data, a larger variety of data, as they try to model this at the speed at which their data moves so that their models are not stale, they realize the three Vs, and the three Vs being volume, variety, and velocity, volume being more data means more history means more time to get to look back in those models, which is important for accounting for fluctuations in seasonality. What about your employee like me who fails to authenticate every six months when password refresh has happened? More variety of data, the more accurate your insights. And again, if your machine learning can move at the speed at which your data moves, you won’t have stale models, and that means you’ll be making more accurate decisions based on your insights.

Melisa Napoles: What happens typically next when organizations realize the three Vs is they then begin to incorporate fit and apply concepts or train and test concepts, essentially breaking up a single workflow with statistics into two workflows for scale so that we can account for the three Vs. Imagine for a moment that you have a data set that represents a fruit basket. You’ve got records for oranges and bananas and apples and grapefruits and you’ve trained that data set to recognize that when there’s a banana, the banana’s yellow and it’s curved so that when new data gets corroborated against that training data set and it sees a data point that is yellow and curved, it can say, “Oh, I know what that is. That’s a banana.” So that’s what incorporating train and testing concepts means. It’s really, in large, part starting to do what we call supervised machine learning.

Melisa Napoles: And sometimes at this point, organizations they’ll start to dabble in creating supervised machine learning models, but it gets to a point where you’ve got such a large volume and variety of data moving so quickly that it’s hard to know all the models you should be using to fit your data … because you don’t want to fit your data to a model, you want to fit the models to your data … that they bring in supervised and unsupervised solutions to help in the world of machine learning.

Melisa Napoles: And so the fit and apply concepts, I would say, fit more in the world of the supervised machine learning, but then you have those unsupervised machine learning models. And if you think about us talking about your unknown unknowns, that third aspect of your known knowns, your known unknowns, and then your unknown unknowns, the questions that you don’t even know to be asking, that typically falls under what unsupervised machine learning helps you solve.

Melisa Napoles: Here’s an example, just one example, one view, one solution of what unsupervised machine learning in the world of cyber security can look like. Forget all the antics of what’s on the visual here. What you’ll notice is if you follow my storyline, you’ve got seven distinct anomalies using machine learning, telling you a larger story of an employee’s account being hijacked and used to steal data. You see anomalies of a ridiculous amount of data being taken from the computer of the employee. You see the employee’s login being logged in from Chicago, from China, from Russia, right? That defies the laws of physics. It’s impossible. You see all these weird things happening in conjunction together that strung together by a bit of supervised machine learning and a whole lot of unsupervised machine learning over a two month period tell you a larger story of what’s happening, things that you wouldn’t have even known to ask about because you didn’t even know what the patterns were to be looking for.

Melisa Napoles: What’s holding organizations back from doing more, from getting to this point of doing unsupervised machine learning and any variety of other things in the world of AI? I firmly believe in all the clients I’ve worked with, small and large, across different industries in cyber security and even in other spaces, but especially in cyber security, it’s the fact that there’s not an onus on being a citizen data scientist, whether it’s leadership not promoting that or individuals not having that fostered within them. And being a citizen data scientist is not being a data scientist, but as the person who works with your data, who creates the data, who is most knowledgeable of your data, there’s nobody better than those people to understand the business impact of that data. And so that’s what it means to be a citizen data scientist, understanding some of the fundamentals so that you can take that data, work with your data science counterparts and really propel the business forward in doing machine learning, doing AI so that you can ultimately impact an organization’s bottom line, whether that’s efficiency or revenue or what have you.

Melisa Napoles: The most prevalent are what you see on the screen here, so don’t be intimidated by AI and ML. It’s very powerful, but it’s nothing that can’t be wrangled. Embrace that idea of being a citizen data scientist. You do not have to be doing the most advanced things with ML to be getting incredible value and have impact. And remember those three Vs, volume, velocity, and variety as you embark on really testing and playing with ML type things.

Melisa Napoles: Remember these concepts of training and testing in the world of supervised and unsupervised machine learning, and then lastly, we didn’t have enough time for it, but remember that you should never be forcing your data to fit algorithms. Rather, you should be able to pick algorithms that fit the flow of your data so that you have accurate insights and you can make really quite powerful data-driven business decisions.

Melisa Napoles: I am going to play a very quick video here, which I find to be very inspiring and works its way into the world of figuring out ways to use machine learning to advance really the business and the world.

Speaker: One inventor is Benjamin Franklin.

Speaker: Leonardo da Vinci.

Speaker: Thomas.

Speaker: Edison.

Speaker: Alexander Bell Graham.

Speaker: No.

Speaker: That’s kind of a tough one.

Speaker: Um.

Speaker: In school, it was always a male inventor, I just realized.

Speaker: To know that there were women before me…

Speaker: It gives me motivation that I can invent something, make maybe a change in the world, and that would be really cool.

Melisa Napoles: All right, so that was a campaign that Microsoft put out for International Women’s Day in 2016. I fell in love with it when I first saw it and I still watch it every now and again just to remind me of a few things.

Melisa Napoles: Lastly here, I do just … Let me see. There we go. What I have to remind myself of, and what I hope that I leave all of you with, is in the world of figuring out how to work with machine learning and not be intimidated by it, but find productive uses for it, don’t be afraid to go out there and really respectfully challenge the status quo.

Melisa Napoles: All right. That’s all from my part. Thank you so much to the Girl Geek organization for letting me speak with you all here today and also letting me learn from the rest of the speakers. It’s been a great event so far.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi. Thanks so much, Melisa. This was great. I want to make sure to thank you for making time for this on a busy weekday. We have some questions that we will take offline, so they’ll be answered offline. Thank you so much, Melisa.

Melisa Napoles: No problem. Take care.

Girl Geek X Microsoft Lightning Talks & Panel (Video + Transcript)

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Angie Chang speaking

Girl Geek X Welcome: Angie Chang kicks off a sold-out Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner at Microsoft Reactor in San Francisco, California.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Transcript of Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks & Panel:

Angie Chang: So hi, everyone. My name is Angie Chang and I’m the founder of Girl Geek X. I want to thank you so much for coming out tonight to the Microsoft Reactor. I’m super excited to see everyone here and to introduce you to all of Microsoft’s girl geeks, to see this amazing art and tech demos. Who here signed up for a demo? I saw a lot of people interested in demos and getting tours, so I’m really excited that you are able to do that. Thank you once again to Microsoft and to all the people who helped plan this night.

Angie Chang: How many of you this is your first Girl Geek Dinner? Wow. And how many of you consider yourself like a regular at Girl Geek Dinners? Thank you so much for coming back again and again. We do this almost every week, going to different tech companies, meeting the girl geeks, and we hope you tune into our podcast. We have a regular podcast on topics from internet security, to emotional security, to management, to working in the Silicon Valley. So please tune in on iTunes or Spotify. We also have a very active social media. So if you follow us at Girl Geek X, you can also tweet and share with Girl Geek X Microsoft tonight and we will retweet and reshare.

Angie Chang: Now I would like to introduce our first presenter. Her name is Kaitlyn Hova and she is the co-owner of Hova Labs, where they have designed and produced the Hovalin, which is a 3D printed violin. Kaitlyn.

Kaitlyn Hova: Thank you so much for having me. This is wonderful. So my name is Kaitlyn Hova. I currently work at Join and I also co-own a company called Hova Labs, where we like to make a bunch of weird projects. It’s kind of like one of those like, “If I had time, why wouldn’t I make this?” kind of companies. So it’s just me and my husband and the biggest thing that we really wanted to do was to find a way to convey what synesthesia was like in real time. Who here knows what synesthesia is? Yeah, it’s not very many people. It’s all right. So synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which two senses are inherently crossed, causing sensations from one sense to lead to an automatic but also involuntary experience in another. A version of this is called chromesthesia, which is when people can physically see sounds.

Kaitlyn Hova: I didn’t know this was in any way unusual until I was around 21 years old when I was in my final music theory course and our professor just mentioned, “Isn’t it crazy? That some people can see sounds?” Yeah, I ended up dropping my music degree and going into neuroscience, because that’s way more interesting, right?

Kaitlyn Hova: So, ever since then, I’ve been trying to find a way to display what synesthesia was like, because when you’re discussing it with people, it tends to end up going into the more like psychedelic conversation, and it’s not really. So, how to display it? I play violin, so we thought, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a violin that we could light up with the colors that I see in real time?” This didn’t exist, so of course you have to go to the drawing board, and the first thing on our list was, “What if we had a clear violin and we just put LEDs in that?” We couldn’t find a clear violin and if we could, it was probably too expensive.

Kaitlyn Hova: So, ended up deciding like, “Well, how hard would it be to 3D print one?” It took a year and a half to figure out how not to make a violin and then to figure out how to. I think we went through about like 30 or 40 iterations because you end up getting really desperate and saying like, “Well, what is the violin anyway?” because it’s really hard to make this. It started out as a stick with strings and then kind of grew from there.

Kaitlyn Hova: So now, here it is. Once we got our first prototype, we ended up deciding that this violin on its own, LEDs aside, was a really great product, so why not release it open source for people to 3D print their own music programs? We’re still seeing a trend in schools where music is systematically underfunded, while these same schools are getting STEM grants, so why not? Seems like a connection there. Thank you.

Kaitlyn Hova violin playing synthesia

Violinist Kaitlyn Hova plays a few songs at Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner.   Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Emily Hove: Let’s hear it for Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn, thank you so much.

Kaitlyn Hova: Thank you.

Emily Hove: This is fantastic. What a great way to start off such an inspirational evening.

Kaitlyn Hova: Thanks.

Emily Hove: So thank you very much.

Kaitlyn Hova: Cheers.

Emily Hove speaking

Program Manager Emily Hove welcomes the Girl Geek X community to Microsoft Reactors around the world, from San Francisco to London!  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Emily Hove: Welcome, everybody. Welcome to the San Francisco Microsoft Reactor and the Girl Geek Dinner.

Kaitlyn Hova: Thank you, Chloe.

Emily Hove: My name is Emily Hove. I’m part of the global Microsoft Reactor program and we have a lot of synergies between Girl Geek and the Microsoft Reactors. Similar to the way Girl Geek inspires and connects women in technology, our Reactors are all about being community hubs and everything that is related to developers and startups, giving developers and startups the tools where they can learn, connect, and build. So, we hope you all find a night that is inspiring and where you’re able to connect and build today.

Emily Hove: If you’re interested in a little bit more about the Reactor program, we’ve got some cards around the room and they talk about some of the fantastic upcoming workshops and meetups that we have. So we’d love to encourage you to check out our calendar of events and invite you all to attend. With that, I’d like to bring up Chloe Condon, who will be our MC for the evening, and help introduce some of the inspiring people and inspiring women in technology that we have for you tonight. So Chloe, cloud developer advocate extraordinaire.

Chloe Condon: Hello. Thank you so much for coming. This is theater in the round. So I’m just going to keep walking in a circle like I’m giving a very serious keynote so you all don’t see my back. Thank you so much for coming tonight. We are so excited to have you here at the Reactor. Who’s first time at the Reactor, this event? Incredible. That is so exciting. I hope we see you here a lot more. If you want to participate in one of the Fake Boyfriend workshops that I put on here, you can build a button to get you out of awkward social situations, come see me after. We are doing those all the time here. They’re so much fun. Also ask me about my smart badge. This is a little scrolling LED badge that we’re probably going to do a workshop for pretty soon, as well. So come see me after if you’re interested at all in learning about those events and we’ll get you signed up for them.

Chloe Condon: I’m going to tell a little story before I introduce our first guest. I am so, so excited to be your MC tonight. I actually met Angie because I went to Hackbright. Do we have any Hackbright or bootcamp grads in the audience? No. Amazing. So, Angie spoke at my bootcamp and told us all about Girl Geek Dinner and I thought, “That sounds so cool. I would love to go to one someday.” So it’s literally a dream come true to be here with all of you today. This is my first Girl Geek Dinner ever, and I get to be your MC.

Chloe Condon: So, I’m so excited to introduce our first speaker tonight. She is incredible. Please, please show everybody how cool your dress is when you come up here, or I’ll be very upset. I would like to introduce Kitty who is going to tell us all about the incredible technology and fashion that she uses to make things like the amazing dress that I’m sure she’s about to tell you about. So Kitty, come on up. All right.

Kitty Yeung Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner

Microsoft Garage Manager Kitty Yeung gives a talk on “Hacking at the Microsoft Garage” at Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Kitty Yeung: Hi, everybody. Good evening. Thank you so much Chloe for introducing me. In fact, I’m not going to talk about my dress. That’s for the demo later. I’m going to talk about actually what’s behind that, all the innovation work that we’ve been doing at Microsoft. So, I’m the manager of The Garage at Microsoft. How many of you have heard of The Garage before? Some of you, some of you I’ve met actually.

Kitty Yeung: So, this is a program that drives the innovation, drives a culture of innovation and experimentation. How do we do that? We say, “Doers not talkers.” We actually get our hands dirty. When we think about something, we act on it. These are the culture pillars for Microsoft. To a lot of us when we first see them, they saw just words, but how do we actually implement these and achieve this? We have all kinds of programs and mechanism to drive innovation in Microsoft. Hacking, we have global sites, we have internship programs, experimental outlet is how we ship projects out, and we have intrapreneurs program, and we do storytelling. So I’m going to go into each of these.

Kitty Yeung: The hacking at Microsoft has become the culture. We actually organize the world’s largest global hackathon at Microsoft, and The Garage is the organization that organizes it. Guess how many people attended this year? Globally, there were 27,000 people attending our hackathon, and everyone was excitedly bringing their great ideas to the hackathon and forming teams all around the world. Whether or not you know them, whether or not you’re from the same org, same teams, you can put your skills together and build something that you feel passionate about. We had thousands of projects every year submitted to the hackathon, and The Garage helps people not only have these ideas submitted, we help them grow their ideas into prototypes, and we help them ship.

Kitty Yeung: Satya is a big supporter of our hackathon. He walks in the tent and look at the projects. He said last year, “Bigger ideas, more customers.” So, we can hack on anything we want. So it could be small things. It could be something that we use every day. It could be something that has real impact in the society, we can really help our customers achieve their industry scale ideas. So we also work with our customers and we bring our customer come here to hack.

Kitty Yeung: The experimental outlet, we also call it a ship channel. So this is a mechanism for us to get those ideas in but also provide them with the business model, idea building, how to enter the market, and we help our employees ship those projects out. So if you go to The Garage website, you will see about 100 projects that’s already in the market, and we feature our employees who came up with those good ideas. You can see all the teams on the website, everyone who put their part time together to really achieve something. So, we also have very big projects that we collaborated with industry partners and customers.

Kitty Yeung: Intrapreneurs program is kind of a internal startup program. It involves these ideas, these teams, hackathon teams, to actually pitch their ideas to the leaders and get support. So some of these projects can grow into a feature of an existing Microsoft product, or sometimes they become a product of Microsoft.

Kitty Yeung: We also run our internship program very differently. If you are familiar with traditional internships, usually students come in and they work under one manager in a big team working on a small part of a big project. Instead, our interns come in as a team and inside a team usually we hire like 30 students per site. Silicon Valley just started our first pilot program, so we only had one team, but we have six really, really good students. Usually we’ll have teams of six to eight, and they have developers, usually a PM, and a designer, forming a complete skill set. Then business teams at Microsoft pitch their ideas to our interns and the interns pick which one they like to do, and they drive it like a startup in the company for 12 weeks. Then they can deliver the projects back to the team, or even better, we can ship it directly into the market. It’s a very, very competitive and rewarding program. So if you’re undergrad, think about applying to that internship program at The Garage.

Kitty Yeung: We also engage with storytelling, those ideas, those projects got shipped out. We tell a story, we have a PR team, and you will see a lot of news articles about Microsoft innovation. Pay attention next time when you read an article like that if they mention The Garage.

Kitty Yeung: The global sites is also our feature. We have seven global locations right now for The Garage, and we are expanding. Each location has our own ecosystem, and also, each location has our facility. We have maker spaces, we have technologies that we provide to our employees. They can do prototyping, they can bring their ideas to share with their colleagues. We do startup pitching. We do show and tell and workshops to educate our people and also give them a platform to achieve their collaborations.

Kitty Yeung: So these are the seven sites worldwide. We’re in Silicon Valley and we are now called The Garage Bay Area. And as you can imagine, we have a unique ecosystem of a lot of startups, a lot of big companies and universities. So we work with all of these people in the ecosystem and we collaborate to really build projects that can impact the world. So, as I mentioned, we work with our employees and engage with all of our business teams inside Microsoft, and we work with customers. We bring them to work on projects and hack with us.

Kitty Yeung: Here are some numbers. You can see that we have very global and diverse team, but we actually only have 20 people worldwide. So, the 20 people drive all of those activities that I just mentioned. 27,000 hackers this year is an updated number. Last year, behind that 27, there was 23,000. You can see that it’s growing every year. It’s only going to get bigger. 76 countries participate and we’ve held more than 100 interns already. With the most competitive schools around our local areas. You can find more than 100 projects that’s in the market and on the global website. 19 of them became actual Microsoft products and lots of social media posts, lots of news articles about Microsoft innovation. So, make sure you follow us on the social media.

Kitty Yeung: Some of the Bay Area’s specific projects. Seeing AI, we build a lot of projects that help the people with needs, people who have disabilities. Seeing AI is a project that we shipped a few years ago that help blind people see through technology. So you can hold a phone, the camera will detect what’s in front of you and also read it out, interpret. It can also detect facial expressions and people’s age. So it gives blind people information about their surroundings.

Kitty Yeung: Sketch 360 is a project we just shipped last year, is by an artist inside Microsoft, Michael Scherotter. He had an idea of, “Why don’t we sketch 360 pictures directly?” So, we can build like a full environmental canvas and you can draw anything you want. You can also put that into VR or AR to visualize it. We also last year shipped some apps. Spend is by MileIQ team. So, lots of local projects. We’re just going through our hackathon projects this year.

Kitty Yeung: So personally, that’s why I’m also here to do a demo. I’ve build some of the projects in The Garage to satisfy personal ambitions of anyone in Microsoft can use The Garage as a resource to build their communities, can build their projects. So I have built a lot of wearable technologies. I’m doing a demo right there. We have these different dresses with different sensors and AI, machine learning functionality, and robotic dresses that I can show you later on. But I also have a passion for quantum computing because of my physics background. I’m a physicist, actually. So, I see the need to build a community of people learning about quantum. So this is a study group that I founded in Bay Area, teaching people how quantum computing works, including physics, maths, the hardware, and software, and any employee with good ideas, they can do this. So we have a lot of employees who wanted to do, say AR tech community, they can come to The Garage and do that. Or they have passion for IOT, they can come to The Garage and do that. So, these are just some examples.

Kitty Yeung: So since Girls Geek is also sort of about career, I think this will be my last slide to show you something about your aspiration. This is a guide. So see where you are in this chart of Ikigai and see where you are and figure out what would you like to be. I think for me, I can feel Ikigai in Microsoft because I’m doing something I love, something the world needs, and something I can be paid for that’s important, and something I’m good at. So, if you can get to that sweet spot, that should be your goal. Also, think about how you’re aligned to the global goals. That’s what I can do. I highlighted some of the goals that I could do in the company as well as through my personal projects. I think I would love to expand this and I think this will be a good guide for everyone, how we can do more impactful work for the world. Thank you.

Chloe Condon: Okay. Wait. You cannot leave the stage without sharing this dress. I’m going to make you model it. It is so incredible. So, do you want to say a little bit about it first?

Kitty Yeung: Okay. This is one of my designs, among the other ones I brought. All of these prints are my own paintings. This is a painting of Saturn and I wanted to simulate Saturn on the dress. How do I do that? Because Saturn has a ring, so why don’t I make a ring that when I rotate it will show Saturn. It also has an angle detector. There’s an accelerometer in here. So if it achieves a certain angle it will light up like the stars.

Chloe Condon: Amazing, amazing.

Kitty Yeung: Thank you.

Chloe Condon: Thank you so much. When you wear such a fabulous dress, we should have had a catwalk. I’m so sorry everyone. Amazing. Thank you so much, Kitty. I really, really love that and I loved that final slide. I took pictures of it so I can look at it later and map out my own plan. I am so excited to introduce our next guest that is going to tell us all about machine learning. Priyanka, come on up to the stage. I have a little … do you need a clicker? Amazing. Here you go.

Priyanka Gariba speaking

Head of TPM for AI Priyanka Gariba gives a talk on “Leading a large scale and complex machine learning program at LinkedIn” at Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu

Priyanka Gariba: Hi, everyone. First off, I’m not showing off anything as cool as what the other women did, but I also want to say this is my first time here at Girl Geek Dinner and I think this is amazing. Look at the energy, like room full of women. How many times in a day do we get to see that, or even a month, right? So thank you for having me. My name is Priyanka Gariba and I lead Artificial Intelligence Technical Program Management group at LinkedIn. My talk for today is going to be how we are scaling machine learning at LinkedIn. We are one of the large and complex program that has been funded by our engineering group.

Priyanka Gariba: So, I’ve structured my talk into four different areas. I’ll give a quick introduction on LinkedIn and some of the products that are really powered very heavily by machine learning. I will then get into the problem statement of what we are trying to do in order to scale machine learning. Then talk a little bit about our technology, and then wrap it up with sure, we can scale with building a solution and with technology, but there’s also an aspect of people, and so how do we scale that, and what is LinkedIn doing about it? Okay. All right. With that, let’s get started with the vision and mission for LinkedIn.

Priyanka Gariba: Our vision is to create economic opportunity for every single member in the global workforce. Our mission is, the way we are going to realize it is of course by connecting world’s professional to make them more productive. Let’s take an example of this room itself, right? So many cool things that were shown up, so many cool people, so many cool women that we spoke to. Just imagine if we were connected to one another, there’s so much value we can bring in each other’s life, and LinkedIn can help us do that. So, how are we trying to realize our vision and our mission is through some of our products.

Priyanka Gariba: I’m hoping and I think everyone here is at least having a profile on LinkedIn, and if you’re not connected to the cool women here in the room, I encourage that before you leave, definitely connect with one another. But some of the products that really help us do that is People You May Know. This is a product line that really helps us build our connections. It understands, there is a recommendation system that runs behind it, there is machine learning models that run behind it, very heavily AI powered, and it really allows us to know who are the people, like minded people, that we need to be connected to, and the value we can bring in each other’s life by just having that connection.

Priyanka Gariba: Then of course there is Feed. Everybody who goes on LinkedIn as a platform is going to see Feed as the first product. Jobs is another product, which is very heavily powered by machine learning behind it. Why am I talking about all these products? AI at LinkedIn is like oxygen, and one thing that all these products have in common is AI. With that, what that means is we know that machine learning is everywhere. It’s powering every single product line that we build, it’s helping us bring the best experiences to all our members across the board. So, because of that one reason, we know that what we need to do is we need to enable more people to do machine learning at LinkedIn.

Priyanka Gariba: So, there are two pieces to my talk. One, which I think I’ll dive into more than the second one, is going to be technology. There’s one way we can scale technology, is by building a solution. How do we enable our machine learning engineers to really build and deploy models faster so that the experiences that they can bring to all the members is at a faster rate. The second one is by scaling people.

Priyanka Gariba: So, to tap into the exact problem that we are trying to solve, let’s look at our machine learning development life cycle. It’s as simple as any software development life cycle, right? Basically a machine learning engineer has an idea, there’s something you want to solve for, what is the first couple of things that they would do? They’ll think about what are the machine learning features that are available to them? How do you crank up all these features together? Try and test it in an offline model, train with some datasets, and once you value it and feel comfortable that this is something good, the next big piece is going to be actually serving it in production and then seeing results through AB testing and all of that.

Priyanka Gariba: I’m not going to dive too much into this. This really just is an extension of that life cycle. Basically you start with an idea and then there are different functions along the way. There is a product management, there’s dev, and the way we really make decisions on product is very heavily powered by our AB testing platform. We make ramp decisions only based on that. Once we see the results, only then do we believe that that is a model that we want to ramp further to our members.

Priyanka Gariba: Why talk about all of this? Why talk about the life cycle, right? If all these products are being built at LinkedIn and if so many people are doing it and all the teams are doing this, what that means is every single team is doing and deploying models in a very different way. There are many, many technologies, they are all on different stacks, it’s not standardized across the board, and one thing we encourage at LinkedIn is for people to move around within teams. So today if you want to work on a Feed team, tomorrow you want to work on a Job Recommendation team, how do you do that? Your stack is different. Half the days are going to be spent in just ramping up.

Priyanka Gariba: So, we introduced something called as Productive Machine Learning. Really our goal is to enable end to end experience of machine development life cycle to be more robust, reliable, and consistent, and standardized. The experience we are looking for is for an ML engineer, all you have to worry about is come up with an idea, and then there is everything else is opaque for you. There is a big box and you don’t have to worry on how you move from one phase to the other. Ideation to machine learning features to training to scoring to serving it in the introduction. You don’t have to worry about this and how are we going to do that.

Priyanka Gariba: So, we’ve put together this program, it’s to give you context, this is a really large scale program, about 6,200 engineers across the board working on it, different geolocations. The way we are structuring it is by talking about three different phases.

Priyanka Gariba: Model creation, going back to that life cycle that you saw, everything from ideation to training and evaluating your model comes under model creation. So we have multiple components that blend into that. Then the next piece for us is deployment. Once you believe that your model is really good and ready for serving, you deploy it in production. The third piece, this is not really a phase, but something that cuts across, is making sure your quality is accurate. Meaning features that you used for your offline training are very similar to what you see in online. So online, offline consistency.

Priyanka Gariba: So, I just wanted to, because I had 10 minutes, I just wanted to give you a flavor of this big undertaking that we are doing at LinkedIn and also give you a little bit of flavor of how we are structured. Typically, every time we build something, we follow a traditional model. You have a leader, you have multiple managers, you have engineers, and you come up with a goal on a project and everyone works together. This one, we wanted to do something different. What we did is, let’s bring every single person in LinkedIn who is really passionate about solving this problem.

Priyanka Gariba: So put together what’s your team, we had everyone across the board, in different geolocations too. There is someone who will be infrastructure heavy. There is someone who is a machine learning engineer who can help us really give us inputs when we are building the solution that it’s really going to work for them. Then there’s product managers, CPMs, engineers, across the board, but it’s really all of these coming together, forgetting the boundaries of management, realizing that there is one goal that we have, is to get an end to end machine learning life cycle ready, was the key thing for us. I already mentioned that, team of teams, we’re geolocated. That is also one reason why we wanted to do that, is we wanted engineers across the board because if we were solving a problem just for headquarters, which is in Mountain View, we will not be solving for everyone at LinkedIn.

Priyanka Gariba: Then of course with any product that you build in any company, there is a big piece of adoption. So, for us, the strategy that we have used is that let’s, the three big phases that we spoke about, let’s build small components underneath it and let’s allow every product team to pick up a component and adopt that depending on what their pain point is. So, for example, if a Feed team is really struggling with how do you train a model, then what we wanted to offer them is pick up that component and get adopted on that. Once you buy the idea, then slowly and gradually navigate into the adoption of the other components too. This helped both ways. This helped us get real early feedback from our customers and users, and then it also allowed us to load balance. So we could develop things while something was already being tested and we were getting that iteration loop from our users.

Priyanka Gariba: So, I spoke about the technology, and I spoke about the solution. The second thing that LinkedIn is doing, and I’m just giving a very high level preview of this, is in order for us to democratize AI or to make it readily available and to enable more engineers to do that, there’s a program that LinkedIn’s kicked off, it’s called AI Academy. There are three different types of courseworks of program, AI 100, 200, 300. As you graduate from one to the other, really the intensity of the techniques and machine learning increases. So AI 100 is really just getting a flavor of what AI is, what machine learning is, and get you familiarized with it. And then 200 you start understanding how do you build a model, and three is when you actually build your own model and put it in production. I can talk all about this and I’m happy to talk about it later on, but this is just a preview, and there’s a lot of blogs and things that we’ve already put on LinkedIn.

Priyanka Gariba: This is another blog for Productive Machine Learning for those of you who are interested in reading more about it, and I’ll share my slides as well. That’s it. Just a quick flavor. I had 10 minutes, so I thought at least I’ll come up here and talk to you and give you a flavor of what we are doing to democratize machine learning at LinkedIn. But happy to, I don’t know if I have time for questions, but I can take questions later on as well. Thank you.

Priyanka Gariba: Okay. I can take a question or two if … After. Okay. All right. Sure.

Chloe Condon: Thank you so much. All right. So, next up, I will take that from you. Next up we have a very special treat, but before I introduce our very special guest, I’m going to show you my favorite LinkedIn feature. How many people have added someone on LinkedIn tonight? Okay. Well now you’re going to add more people. So, if you go to your LinkedIn app in the very top in the search bar, there is a barcode, a scanning barcode, and if you click on that, instead of having to type out the person’s name and awkwardly ask for spelling, you can just scan their barcode tonight. So you can share that secret tip that I learned recently from someone else at a meet up that I now pass onto you to make spelling people’s names less awkward. So definitely scan everyone’s badge here tonight. My best advice always in tech is to meet as many people as you can, and tell your story and share their stories while you’re here tonight with all these amazing people.

Chloe Condon: I am going to welcome our very, very special guest for tonight, Charlotte. Come on down. We are so excited to welcome Charlotte Yarkoni to the SF Reactor. Here you go.

Charlotte Yarkoni speaking

Corporate Vice President, Cloud + AI Division, Charlotte Yarkoni gives a warm welcome at Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu

Charlotte Yarkoni: Thank you. I need to start out and tell you guys, I’m sick. I really, really apologize for my voice. I’ve been told I don’t look as bad as I sound, so I thought it’d still be okay to show up, but hopefully you’ll manage to go with me this evening. It was important for me to come. So again, I hope you can work with me on the sound quality. But my problem is as I’m watching everybody on stage, I wanted one of these mics so I can put it down, cough, and anywhere I go I’m going to … somebody’s in my blast radius. So, if I come over here and stand by the post, please don’t be offended.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Anyways, good to be here tonight. Thank you guys all for coming. I thought what I would do is first share with you a little bit about my journey of being a woman in tech and what that’s meant to me in my career. I do need a clicker. My telepathic PowerPoint clicking slides are not on today due to the head cold. So, I actually go talk a lot to universities. I go to some high schools. I love talking to young girls about STEM, but I always kind of have to ground in. Let me tell you what tech looked like when I was in middle school and high school.

Charlotte Yarkoni: This was it, by the way. There were no smartphones, there were no tablets, there were no laptops. I remember when Asteroids came out and me and my brothers thought it was amazing. Right? So that’s kind of where we were. Then this was our social network. There was no Twitter, there was no WeChat, there was no Snapchat. It was pretty much a bonfire in somebody’s field when their parents were out of town in the town I grew up in. So, that’s kind of where I come from.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I actually, I grew up in South Carolina. I was super fortunate to get a scholarship to come to UC Berkeley. I’m pretty sure I’m the only person from South Carolina to ever go to Berkeley. I was actually part of an inaugural program at the time called Electrical Engineering or Computer Science, or EECS as it was known. This is what code looked like when I was coding. Has anybody ever written in Lisp? Anyone? Did anyone? Yeah. Kicking it old school. All right. So, that was sort of my education, if you will, and my real foray into tech.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Then, I got out of college and started working and figuring out how to use technology as an applied science, not just in an academic sense, and this was kind of the world I was in. Actually cell phones came out and yes, that’s what they looked like for those of you that weren’t born then, because I know there’s a few of you here. Windows 95 was all the rage, right? You remember that? Then we get to today and it’s just a very, very different world.

Charlotte Yarkoni: One of the things that I love about technology is the fact that it has actually opened up all of our worlds, in so many ways that we can have so much more impact. We can instantly connect to people that we could never connect to 30, 40, 50 years ago. I’m not that old, I’m just framing my comments. But you think about that and it’s not just connecting to those people, it’s the access to information that you also have immediately at your fingertips. It’s amazing. It’s amazing that what you can harness with that kind of resources at your fingertips.

Charlotte Yarkoni: The challenge is, though, it comes with a responsibility, and I will tell you, at Microsoft, and GitHub, and LinkedIn, we spend a lot of time on that. In fact, it’s not just about innovating, it’s about innovating with purpose, and really making sure that you’re actually leaving the world in a better place than you found it before you introduced your solutions. So it’s those unintended consequences that you have to be very thoughtful about. As we continue to get more and more technology at our disposal, how do we use it for good? That kind of brings me to really, what’s my role.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Today in my role is, at Microsoft, I run a group called Commerce and Ecosystems. You can tell I’m not a marketing person, so there you go. But I’m really here. I focus on answering three questions. The first is, how do people actually discover who we are and what we do in our products and services? And Microsoft’s a very big company, it’s a global landscape. We offer lots of different products and services across our portfolio, but there are a lot of ecosystems and communities that actually don’t know who we are and what we do.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Five years ago it was a lot about open source, and I remember I actually went to … I started at Microsoft about three years ago and I went to an open source conference. By the way, I grew up in open source, so my background actually started out in Unix and moved to Linux. I never wrote a piece of code in .NET. Would probably look and feel a little bit like Lisp to me, honestly, if I tried to do it now. So when I came to Microsoft, I went to a familiar conference, and people were like, “Why are you here, man? Azure doesn’t run Linux.” I’m like, “What are you talking about? Yeah, it does.” People need to know, right? So we had to go fix that.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Second thing I focus on is after you discover us, how do you engage with us in a way that’s meaningful to you? And most of that is online. People don’t always want to have to go somewhere to learn how to do something. They will now have to sign up for a week long course, right? Necessarily to know how to build a solution using the technology that they have. So we spend a lot of time and energy focused on that and what’s the set of tooling or resources that we can offer.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Then the final point is, how do we just get easier to do business with our customers and partners? That’s where the commerce piece comes in and it’s all about what are some of the new business models we need to create to actually, how do we run all those capabilities across all our products and all our channels today? So there is a good bit of engineering that comes in each one of these aspects, but there’s also a lot of business work that I have to focus on. And again, it comes with that overarching layer of responsibility, is to how do we think about continuing to make progress in a positive way so we can have a positive impact on the communities we serve.

Charlotte Yarkoni: So that’s kind of who I am, and I think what we’re going to do at this stage is a little bit of like an AMA, and I’m really hoping you guys don’t ask me too many questions because the more I talk I think the worse I sound, but I will try to answer everything for sure. I was going to have Chloe join me, and I was going to have Shaloo Garg join me. So, just as a reminder of both, Chloe and Shaloo are part of my team and they’re part of the drive discovery effort. So I’ll let you guys, you guys will talk a little bit more about yourselves, I’m sure, but I’m going to turn it over to our master of ceremonies. Kick us off. Do you want that mic or you want–

Chloe Condon: Sure. Mics all round here.

Charlotte Yarkoni: This one may be contaminated.

Chloe Condon: All right. I wouldn’t want to catch the virus, the Charlotte virus. Amazing. So, I figure we’ll have a seat. Have a seat wherever. We had a bunch of people submit questions earlier in our fishbowl, thank you so much for all of the questions that we got earlier. So, what I figured I would do is we would start with an introduction with Shaloo. Would you like to tell everyone who you are, what you do?

Shaloo Garg, Chloe Condon, Charlotte Yarkoni

Microsoft girl geeks: Senior Cloud Developer Advocate Chloe Condon, Corporate Vice President for Cloud + AI Charlotte Yarkoni, and Managing Director of Silicon Valley’s Microsoft for Startups Shaloo Garg answer audience questions with candor at Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu

Shaloo Garg: Yeah. Absolutely. Firstly, thank you guys so much for coming here today. It means a lot. My name is Shaloo Garg and I lead the startup business growth for Silicon Valley for Microsoft, and entire California as well. It’s an exciting space to be in, and part of Charlotte’s team and part of what we do is not only engage with founders and CTOs and CIOs here of startups, but also drive meaningful partnerships, which is … this is Silicon Valley, there are a lot of partners here, how do we work with them to drive awareness of how Microsoft can help entrepreneurs there? So good to be here.

Chloe Condon: Amazing. Thank you so much. I have these randomly selected questions here.

Shaloo Garg: Those are a lot of questions.

Chloe Condon: It’s a lot of questions. I don’t know if we’re going to get through all of them. We may do kind of a rapid inside the actor’s studio type of lightning round at the end here. But I love this first one. I chose this one first and this is for Charlotte. It says, “What’s it like being an executive at one of the top companies? Do you have a life?” Great phrasing, whoever wrote this.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I’d like to think I have a life. Yes, I do have a life. I have two children, both girls, one–

Chloe Condon: Great. Are they coding already?

Charlotte Yarkoni: One is 23, just graduated. She went to Reed College, and by the way, back to Berkeley, I thought when I went to Berkeley from South Carolina, I was an enlightened liberal. And when I dropped my daughter off at Reed College, I felt like I was the most conservative person on the planet. I was a little worried about my life choices at that point. But she graduated there in linguistics and she actually is starting school this week, getting her master’s at University of Washington.

Charlotte Yarkoni: She would be very offended if I called her a developer or an engineer, yet she spends a lot of time writing programs and are doing statistical analysis on languages because she focuses on Russian, Japanese, Spanish language and language heritage.

Chloe Condon: Wow.

Charlotte Yarkoni: So, that’s my oldest. My youngest is 13, and a prolific gamer and developer. Python is her language of choice. She has lots of opinions about every other language.

Chloe Condon: As she should.

Charlotte Yarkoni: It kind of takes me longer these days to set up an environment for her to code in than it does for her to whip out a new game that she’s thinking about. So, I’m pretty sure she’s going to end up somewhere in the engineer community as a professional at one point. I also have three horses. I ride. I grew up three day eventing, for those of you who know what that is. Now that I’m older and have kids, I wondered what my parents were thinking when they let me do that. But I still ride and I still compete. Then I do my day job.

Chloe Condon: That is a fun fact.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I think the thing about today’s technology is, the good and the bad is it allows you to be accessible all the time. So, you can actually, you have to know how to be at the right place at the right time, which is usually the conflict that occurs, but you are able to go do what you need to do personally and do things professionally as you go. So that’s something I’m really, I feel privileged by who I work for in the industry I’m in and the technologies that we’ll be bringing for all the working moms out there.

Chloe Condon: Wow. That’s actually a great segue into the next question, which I’ll direct to Shaloo first, which is, how do you relax and unwind? Like with how long and tough your day jobs are, how do you get to chill?

Shaloo Garg: So, best is tennis. I love playing tennis and that’s how I unwind, and when I go out and play tennis, I try not to take my cell phone with me or my kids. So I have a 13-year-old daughter too, and a nine-year-old son who quite a handful.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Do you have any Serena moments on the court?

Shaloo Garg: I do. But that’s how I unwind, which is just completely unplug, just a moment of Zen and just go out there and hit it.

Chloe Condon: I’m very similar. I craft. I like to do like things with my hands and not look at a screen and just build something fun, like a costume or something that lights up. And you’re riding horses.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Yeah, but I could not build a costume. So, we each have our strengths.

Chloe Condon: Hit me up for Halloween. We’ll get you guys–

Charlotte Yarkoni: I’m going to hit you up for Halloween. Okay.

Chloe Condon: This one says, “What would be your advice for your past self coming straight out of college?” I love that question.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Who you asking?

Chloe Condon: Anyone can jump in. Yeah.

Shaloo Garg: I think coming out of college, I wish I was more aware of getting a coach or a mentor, which I was not aware. And during my career I sort of looked upon women leaders and requested them to be mentors and coaches. So what I try to do now is go out and coach and mentor women or young girls myself. So, I realize that they may be in the same situation as I was in, which is, “Hey, I can ask a woman leader to say, ‘Would you mind spending 30 minutes with me?'” But they don’t ask. Right? So I preemptively do that in schools, colleges here in Silicon Valley. Actually right up our Market Street office, that’s another office of ours, every month, I host open office hours for young women who are out there, budding entrepreneurs. It doesn’t have to do anything with Microsoft. So, as soon as you walk in the door, it doesn’t have to be, “Hey, you have to sign up to work with us,” but it’s just coaching, and I love it. So, wish I had that, but a part of me is just giving back, just making sure that someone out there is benefiting.

Chloe Condon: Yeah, that’s great advice. Charlotte.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I think, for me, one of the things that it’s taken me a long time to appreciate and I really, I encourage everybody to have some thought about this for their own journey, both personally and professionally, resilience is such an important thing. When I look back on my career, I feel, again, very privileged to have worked in all the places and spaces that I have. But the successes I had weren’t one success right after the other. It was a success built off of quite frankly, a mountain of failures and trials to get there. It was about taking those learnings and applying and getting better. I think a lot of what we do as an industry is about solving a problem, solving an opportunity, and getting better as we go, and iterating, and it’s really hard to do that as a person.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I’m going to go out on a limb and assume all you people here are somewhat overachievers. So every time that you have a failure, you want to prosecute the failure and you want to prosecute yourself, and that’s okay as long as you make it a constructive thing and learn from it, and the older you get and the more experienced you get, the more you start to really embrace and almost be proud of those failures for what they taught you, because you wouldn’t be wherever you are without it. That’s just a fact. I don’t know that I appreciated that in my younger age. I was certainly an overachiever and thought I knew a lot more than I knew at the time. I know that’s shocking, but it’s true. But as I went through my career, it was a process for me to understand how to really get value in the mistakes, how to really give value in the failures, and use them to move forward.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I just would encourage everybody, get out there and try. That’s step one and step two, is make sure you learn and embrace the mistakes, right? And it is about that of resilience that will just make you so much of a better person whatever you decide to do, however you decide to do it.

Chloe Condon: My advice would be, I don’t think I knew right when I graduated what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I wish I had taken a little time to travel or maybe to explore different industries and fields that maybe I wanted to dip my toe in. Because I think what the wonderful thing about working in tech is you don’t have to commit to doing the same thing for your entire life. You can always change and learn a completely new technology or … There was a tweet that I think I retweeted this morning, which was, “Your job that you have in five years may not even exist. So try not to plan out your life too strategically,” and I think that’s really wonderful advice because technology is growing at a rapid rate and we may be working for something we don’t even know exists yet. The new, I don’t know, a new iPhone. Who knows?

Chloe Condon: Great. Next question that I have is, I love this one, “What’s the best book you’ve read this year?” Does anyone have one? I know mine. I can go first while people think.

Shaloo Garg: Go, go for it.

Chloe Condon: I read a book. Oh no, you go first because I want to make sure I get her name right, the author’s name right.

Shaloo Garg: So I think the life-changing moment for me was the book that I read by Eckhart Tolle. It’s called The Power of Now, and it teaches you a lot about what Charlotte talked about, failure. It also teaches you how to stay engaged but not attached, which is you’re really passionate about something that you’re doing. Keep that passion, but don’t get so emotionally sucked into it that you break down. So it also teaches you mindfulness and awareness. And then how to be an A player, which is you’re mindful, you’re aware of what you’re doing, but guess what? You got to go and get it. So I thought that was completely life-changing for me because I learned quite a bit in terms of just being strong, being very passionate about what I do, but not emotional, and then just chasing it, chasing the ball and just chasing the heck out of it.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Mine’s an oldie but a goodie, because my youngest was doing a book report on this one, the Life of Pi.

Chloe Condon: That’s a good one.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I just loved that. I haven’t read it in many years and so she brought it home and I brought out my copy so we could read it together. It is just an amazing book.

Chloe Condon: That is on my list. You said yours was The Power of Now?

Shaloo Garg: Power of Now.

Chloe Condon: Okay. Write that one down, everyone. I recently read Just the Funny Parts by Nell Scovell, she’s a female comedy writer, and I found … it’s an autobiographical piece. She used to write for Saturday Night Live, David Letterman, and it’s a completely male dominated field. It was the first time I had read about an industry other than tech that was similarly structured and formatted and it talked about, she’s a comedy writer, so it comes from this place of empathy and humor, and I would highly recommend it. She helped write Sheryl Sandberg’s book. She also wrote a lot of Obama’s jokes, I found out in that book. So, a lot of the things that made us chuckle from Obama came from her.

Chloe Condon: So, next one is, “Who has influenced you most in your life and why?”

Charlotte Yarkoni: That one’s actually really hard. I will tell you both my parents passed away in the last year. They were quite older. I’m the youngest of a large family. Pretty sure I was an accident, so, it’s okay. But you spend a lot of time reflecting on your nuclear family when those kinds of things happen, and they happen inevitably to everyone. So I definitely think my parents had a large influence on my life. I think my teachers had a large influence on my life. I’m the proud product of the public education system of South Carolina, which I think at the time I was growing up was like 49th in the country. But I went from there to UC Berkeley, which was an amazing school. And I had some amazing teachers to help me learn how to learn, is what I got from that.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I’ve been super fortunate to have some great mentors and what I would call guidance counselors throughout my career, that I still do lunch with and dinners with and catch up with. So, I feel like I’ve had a lot of influences and I do think for the last 20 plus years, though, my kids have probably taught me more humility and patience and resilience and all the other virtues we speak so highly of. They’ve probably been the biggest forcing function in my life in recent years.

Chloe Condon: What about the horses?

Charlotte Yarkoni: The horses are my sanity. I will tell you, we moved to Australia for a couple of years and I couldn’t take my horses with me and I was, my husband will tell you, I was a miserable person for the time I was gone.

Chloe Condon: I’m picturing you writing postcards back to your horses at home.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I came home. I came home every two months to see them.

Chloe Condon: Aww. How about you, Shaloo?

Shaloo Garg: So, parents, but I think my mom. So I lost my parents at a very young age. I remember when thinking back growing up, so I was born in India, but I grew up in Middle East, and I grew up in a community where there was lot of domestic violence and girls were not allowed to go to school. And so there were a lot of changes that were happening around me. In fact, while growing up, I went to 14 different schools between elementary, middle, and high school. So you can imagine moving from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, to Kuwait during the war zone time. But I remember going through all this, my mom always taught me and my sister is that, if there’s ever a problem in life and there is a simpler solution, and there is a hard solution, guess what? Pick the hardest one, because it’s going to make you go through that process, whereas a simpler one, you’re just going to take it and just sit with it and you’re not going to learn anything. So I do look back and I think that she’s had an amazing influence on me.

Shaloo Garg: And as Charlotte said, my kids, I keep learning from them every single day. They teach me so many things in terms of if I get upset about something, they’ll just say, “Hey mom, just relax. This is just a small thing, just move on.” I think that’s how I keep learning more and more. And of course, amazing coaches and mentors and some really amazing female leaders who I look upon to.

Chloe Condon: I would have to agree. My mother passed away when I was 16, but she was a costume designer, graphic designer, creative arts person, and I try to bring my creative arts training and background into all the technology that I do and create. So I think that was probably the biggest influence on me, would have to be my mom as well.

Chloe Condon: What is the biggest challenge we are facing in tech currently? A tough one.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I actually think our biggest challenge as a society is climate change. I think technology can be a solution for that. So, that’s an indirect answer to a direct question, but I would say that is the thing that I would love to see all of us, I don’t care what you’re doing, where you’re working, but to start having serious thoughts about how we can go reverse decades of adverse effect on the planet. It helps everybody, and I do think the real accelerants are going to lie not just in changing our behavior and our consumption, but also in having technology help us. I don’t think we’ve really gone there yet as a society at large. So for me, it’s something I’m kind of anxious to push along however I can in whatever small way that I can. I think that’s how I think about it.

Charlotte Yarkoni: With technology, you have things like quantum, which is just amazing. The beauty of working somewhere like Microsoft is we are spending a ton of research and we have really crazy people, crazy smart people working on this, and every now and then if I have to go give a talk and I need to give my five minutes of quantum computing update for the cloud, I always ask, “Are there any theoretical physicists in the audience? Because if there are, I’m not going to do this because you know way more than me,” kind of thing.

Chloe Condon: Come on up.

Charlotte Yarkoni: But it’s amazing, and in essence you take what sits in a data center the size of a football field today and you can run it in what’s in the size of a refrigerator in your house. But, the cooling you need to do that is extraordinarily more than the power we’re consuming today, and the impact that will have, by the way, if it’s not done right, either we’re not producing it correctly and/or we’re not cooling it correctly, can have a devastating effect. So how do we think about things like that, these new trends with this aspect of sustainability around the climate, I think is super important. So I apologize, I kind of rambled on that answer, but I actually think this one’s a really important one.

Chloe Condon: I agree. I actually met someone at Open Source Summit recently who works on our IOT team here at Microsoft in Redmond, and his job on the IOT team is to help offset our carbon emissions from our server center. So I thought, “That’s such an important, important way for us to help make the environment a better place with Microsoft.” So, yeah.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Absolutely, and the lady who runs our data centers, her name is Noelle, she’s a peer of mine. I love her dearly. She’s just an amazing woman. She actually grew up as a chemical engineer.

Chloe Condon: Wow.

Charlotte Yarkoni: A lot of her time on how do we run our data centers is spent in areas that you and I wouldn’t know how to go solve, because it is about how do you think about power? How do you think about new sources like geothermal and things like that. I think it’s great. I think it’s great we’re thinking that way, but we got to do more.

Chloe Condon: Yeah.

Shaloo Garg: I think the biggest challenge is the knowledge or the lack of awareness behind power of technology. So, I often see this, I keep bringing up edtech as a very common example, and in fact, here in the Valley, edtech is right now the hottest topic in the social impact circle. I can guarantee you, when I throw the word school out here and I ask you to just close your eyes and think of, tell me what you think of. You’re going to think of a building. You’re going to think of kids running, a blackboard, and a teacher. But that’s not what education is only. Education can be a seven-year-old girl sitting in Uganda who’s not allowed to go to school, but she can sit at home and do schooling at home using an iPad, right? Just because she’s a girl, she’s not allowed to go to school.

Shaloo Garg: That is the power of technology, and it kills me every single day when I read about places like Somalia and Syria, and so many other places, where easily companies, and Microsoft does amazing job, that’s one thing I’m really proud to be, which is be part of this company. We do amazing work globally in enabling this. I think we need to continue to talk about the power of technology, which we do in our jobs and outside our jobs, but we need more and more people to go out there and coach people and say, “Hey guys, education is just not about textbooks. It can be digital education powered by technology.” I think that to me is the biggest challenge right now, which is lack of awareness.

Chloe Condon: Yeah, accessibility and access to that is so important.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Can I interrupt this broadcast? Do we have any recruiters in the audience? Because I think we have our newest recruit. She did an awesome walk-in by the way.

Chloe Condon: Love the pants. Great pants. This is a very fun question. What emoji do you use most often?

Charlotte Yarkoni: I don’t use them correctly, as my children … I always send them stuff–

Chloe Condon: It’s the horse one, right?

Charlotte Yarkoni: … and they’re like, “Why did you send me this? Do you know what this means?” I’m like, “No. No.”

Chloe Condon: I think that’s part of your job as a mom, right?

Charlotte Yarkoni: Well, I have gotten in this habit of sending random ones just to freak my kids out.

Chloe Condon: Love it.

Charlotte Yarkoni: I usually am pretty clean at work with the okay and the goofball face, and the smiley face, but it cracks me up because we were just having this discussion the other day, because I sent something that apparently I shouldn’t have sent as a parent.

Chloe Condon: It’s like a secret hidden emoji language.

Charlotte Yarkoni: It really is.

Chloe Condon: Yeah.

Charlotte Yarkoni: And you, what do you use?

Chloe Condon: I would say it’s a tie between the sobbing emoji and the laugh crying emoji, because I don’t have any other two emotions other than those two extremes. There’s no in between for me. I’m either hysterically laughing or hysterically crying.

Charlotte Yarkoni: What do you use, Shaloo?

Shaloo Garg: Smile and laughter, and that’s it. For the kids, with the kids, I’ll just use hearts, and sometimes my daughter says, “Mom, just stop using those… You’re embarrassing me, mom.”

Chloe Condon: Yeah. What are the most important decisions you face every day? Or what is the most important decision you face every day?

Shaloo Garg: How to make founders successful, and especially in a market like this. I just love it. It’s an upstream market, constantly challenging ourselves. What else can we do? What else can we do in this market? I absolutely love it. It is challenging. It’s extremely challenging.

Chloe Condon: It’s a huge question.

Shaloo Garg: It’s a huge question. I’ve been with the company for eight months and when I joined initially, I was a bit nervous. I was like, “Great, I’m so excited about this job,” and when I went out there, talked to founders, everyone was like, everyone gave me a standard response, “Well, yeah, okay.” But now slowly and slowly we’ve started building it as part of the narrative that we haven’t only the meetings, which is how do we help the founders, and if we switched that, our jobs become much more easier, which is, “I’m here to help you and this is how I can help you.” So I think that to me is absolutely the most fun part.

Chloe Condon: Yeah.

Charlotte Yarkoni: By the way, as part of my team, that’s a great answer for these little startups. I think my job is really making the set of decisions that best serve our customers, our partners, best serve the team. It’s always a balance, right? We have so much we’ve got to get done. We love innovating, we love getting new capabilities out there, making sure that we’re doing that with the right sense of urgency and the right balance for the teams delivering them. Most of my day, in any one of my teams that I look at, is just making the right calls to make sure that we’re doing right by the community, as both our community that’s working on it and the communities we’re trying to serve.

Chloe Condon: Yeah. I would say for me it’s how to get people excited to learn, and what is going to get them having fun. Because I think we work all day, we work like an eight-hour plus day sometimes in front of machines using technology, and what are fun creative ways to get people excited about that and to build really cool, amazing things together that can solve these big questions and problems like the environment and getting accessibility to folks who don’t have the access to this technology. So, it’s always fun to enable that power to people.

Chloe Condon: How much time do we have? Do we want to do maybe one or two more questions? One more question. Okay, cool. Let’s see. I think this is a really good … Actually, I would love to end with your advice to all of our amazing women in this audience, and men in the audience. What would be your advice to someone who’s looking to move up in their career and have a successful career as a person in tech?

Charlotte Yarkoni: I think being you is the most important part. Whatever that means, right? Just be your most authentic self. It’s a hard thing to do. It’s a hard thing in our industry. It’s a hard thing in super competitive environments like here in San Francisco. Seattle is very similar in that regard. I have found people get the most reward and have the most success when they’re actually themselves, whatever that means. I also think being the authentic you will not just make you better, it will actually make whatever team you’re on better. It will make whatever company you’re at better, it will make whatever product or service you’re working on better. Just be you and be proud to be you.

Chloe Condon: I love that.

Shaloo Garg: So, I would say do what you’re passionate about because when you’re passionate, you bring your best. Do not be afraid to take risk, and I know this sounds like a cliche, but really challenge yourself. If there is a risk, if you want to do something and it looks very risky, just go ahead and do it. Maximum, you’re going to fail, but you’ll learn something from it. If you come out victorious, that’s great. Then the last thing I would say is just trust yourself and just believe in your instinct that you’re doing good for the business, you’re doing good for the company, you’re also doing good for those startups or customers or whoever your stakeholders are, and just go chase it. If you keep it straight and if you keep what I call the compass straight, there’s going to be lots of amazing learning in the process.

Chloe Condon: My advice is actually a great segue into our mingling and happy hour section. Mine would be to talk to as many people as you can in this industry. If you have the opportunity to get coffee with someone you really idolize or a mentor, or someone who’s doing what you want to be doing in this industry, having conversations, I think, is so wonderful and you are all about to use that LinkedIn feature that I just taught you, and meet some really amazing people. So make connections and network and yeah, have the most amazing time.

Chloe Condon: I want to thank both of our…

Shaloo Garg: Thank you.

Chloe Condon: … panelists today. Round of applause for Shaloo and Charlotte.

Charlotte Yarkoni: Thank you for hosting.

Chloe Condon: Of course. Thank you to to Kitty. Thank you to Priyanka. Thank you to everyone, to Kaitlyn who’s not here, but oh my gosh, that amazing, amazing musical performance we had to start off the evening. Please, enjoy yourselves. I think we still have some beverages and snacks here, so have a wonderful time. Make sure you get some swag and stickers and we will be around to chat. All right. Thanks everyone.

Microsoft girl geeks, Microsoft Reactor fun

Microsoft girl geeks and allies: Thank you to all the Redmond, San Francisco and Silicon Valley teams who worked together to make this happen!   Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Kitty Yeung Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner

Microsoft Garage Manager Kitty Yeung is a creative technologist with a skirt that lights up when she spins.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu

girl geek experiencing Microsoft mix reality

Principal Program Manager Lead Jane Fang and SF Academy Head of Marketing Jo Ryall demo “Mix Reality” to a girl geek  at Microsoft Girl Geek Dinner.   Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X


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Girl Geek X OpenAI Lightning Talks and Panel (Video + Transcript)

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Gretchen DeKnikker, Sukrutha Bhadouria

Girl Geek X team: Gretchen DeKnikker and Sukrutha Bhadouria kick off the evening with a warm welcome to the sold-out crowd to OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner in San Francisco, California.   Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Transcript of OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner – Lightning Talks & Panel:

Gretchen DeKnikker: All right, everybody, thank you so much for coming tonight. Welcome to OpenAI. I’m Gretchen with Girl Geek. How many people it’s your first Girl Geek? All right, okay. Lots of returning. Thank you for coming. We do these almost every week, probably like three out of four weeks a month. Up and down the peninsula, into the South Bay or everywhere. We also have a podcast that you could check out. Please check it out, find it, rate it, review it. Give us your most honest feedback because we’re really trying to make it as awesome as possible for you guys. All right.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi, I’m Sukrutha. Welcome, like Gretchen said, Angie’s not here but there’s usually the three of us up here. Tonight, please tweet, share on social media, use the hashtag GirlGeekXOpenAI. I also, like Gretchen, want to echo that we love feedback, so any way you have anything that you want to share with us. Someone talked about our podcast episodes today. If there’s any specific topics you want to hear, either at a Girl Geek Dinner or on our podcast, do share that with us. Either you can find us tonight or you can email us. Our website is girlgeek.io and all our contact information’s on there. Thank you all. I don’t want to keep you all waiting because we have amazing speakers lined up from OpenAI, so.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Oh, one more quick thing. We’re opening up sponsorship for 2020 so if your company has not sponsored a Girl Geek dinner before or has and wants to do another one, definitely now’s the time to sign up because we fill up pretty fast. We don’t want to do too many in one month. Like Gretchen said, we do one every week so definitely would love to see a more diverse set of companies–continue to see that like we did this year. Thank you, all. Oh, and over to Ashley.

Ashley Pilipiszyn speaking

Technical Director Ashley Pilipiszyn emcees OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner.   Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Ashley Pilipiszyn: All right, thank you.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thanks.

Ashley Pilipiszyn: All right. Hi, everybody.

Audience: Hi.

Ashley Pilipiszyn: Oh, awesome. I love when people respond back. I’m Ashley and welcome to the first ever Girl Geek Dinner at OpenAI. We have a … Whoo! Yeah.

Ashley Pilipiszyn: We have a great evening planned for you and so excited to see so many new faces in the crowd but before we get started, quick poll. How many of you currently work in AI machine learning? Show of hands. All right, awesome. How many of you are interested in learning more about AI machine learning? Everybody’s hands should be up. All right. Awesome. We’re all on the right place.

Ashley Pilipiszyn: Before we kick things off, I’d like to give just a brief introduction to OpenAI and what we’re all about. OpenAI is an AI research lab of about 100 employees, many of whom you’re going to get to meet this evening. Definitely, come talk to me. Love meeting you. We’ve got many of other folks here, and our mission is to ensure that safe, artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

Ashley Pilipiszyn: To that effect, last year we created the OpenAI Charter. The charter is our set of guiding principles as we enact this mission and serves as our own internal system of checks and balances to hold ourselves accountable. In terms of how we organize our research, we have three main buckets. We have AI capabilities, what AI systems can do. We have AI safety, so ensuring that these systems are aligned with human values. We have AI policy, so ensuring proper governance of these systems.

Ashley Pilipiszyn: We recognize that today’s current AI systems do not reflect all of humanity and we aim to address this issue by increasing the diversity of contributors to these systems. Our hope is that with tonight’s event, we’re taking a step in the right direction by connecting with all of you. With that, I would like to invite our first speaker to the stage, Brooke Chan. Please help me welcome Brooke.

Brooke Chan speaking

Software Engineer Brooke Chan from the Dota team gives a talk on reinforment learning and machine learning at OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Brooke Chan: Yeah. Hello. Is this what I’m using? Cool. I’m Brooke Chan. I was a software engineer on the Dota 2 team here at OpenAI for the past two years. Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about our project, as well as my own personal journey throughout the course of the project.

Brooke Chan: We’re going to actually start at the end. On April 13th, we hosted the OpenAI Five Finals where we beat the TI8 world champions OG at Dota 2 in back-to-back games on stage. TI stands for The International, which is a major tournament put on by Valve each year with a prize pool upwards of $30 million. You can think of it like the Super Bowl but for Dota.

Brooke Chan: There have been previous achievement/milestones of superhuman AI in both video games and games in general, such as chess and Go, but this was the first AI to beat the world champions at an eSports game. Additionally, as a slightly self-serving update, OG also won the world championship this year at TI9 just a few weeks ago.

Brooke Chan: Finals wasn’t actually our first unveiling. We started the project back in January of 2018 and by June of 2018, we started playing versus human teams. Leading up to finals, we played progressively stronger and stronger teams, both in public and in private. Then most recently, right before finals, we actually lost on stage to a professional team at TI8, which was the tournament that OG later went on to win.

Brooke Chan: Let’s go back to the basics for a minute and talk about what is reinforcement learning. Essentially, you can think of it as learning through trial and error. I personally like to compare it to dog training so that I can show off pictures of my dog. Let’s say that you want to teach a dog how to sit, you would say sit and just wait for the dog to sit, which is kind of a natural behavior because you’re holding a treat up over their head so they would sit their butt down and then you would give them that treat as a reward.

Brooke Chan: This is considered capturing the behavior. You’re making an association between your command, the action and the reward. It’s pretty straightforward for simple behaviors like sit but if you want to teach something more complicated, such as like rolling over, you would essentially be waiting forever because your dog isn’t just going to roll over because it doesn’t really understand that is something humans enjoy dogs doing.

Brooke Chan: In order to kind of teach them this, you instead reward progress in the trajectory of the goal behavior. For example, you reward them for laying down and then they kind of like lean over a little bit. You reward them for that. This is considered to be shaping rewards. You’re like teaching them to explore that direction in order to achieve ultimately your goal behavior.

Brooke Chan: Dota itself is a pretty complicated game. We can’t just reward it by purely on winning the game because that would be relatively slow so we applied this technique of shaped rewards in order to teach the AI to play the game. We rewarded it for things like gold and kills and objectives, et cetera. Going more into this, what is Dota?

Brooke Chan: Dota is a MOBA game which stands for multiplayer online battle arena. It’s a little bit of a mouthful. It’s a game that was developed by Valve and it has an average of 500,000 people playing at any given time. It’s made up of two teams of five and they play on opposite sides of the map and each player controls what’s considered a hero who has a unique set of abilities.

Brooke Chan: Everyone starts off equally weak at the beginning of the game, which means that they’re low levels and they don’t have a lot of gold and the goal is that over the course of a 30 to 60-minute game, they earn gold and become stronger and eventually, you destroy your opponent’s base. You earn gold and experience across the map through things like small fights or like picking people off, killing your enemy, taking objectives, things like that. Overall, there’s a lot of strategy to the game and a lot of different ways to approach it.

Brooke Chan: Why did we pick Dota? MOBAs in general are considered to be one of the more complex video games and out of that genre, Dota is considered the most complex. Starting off, the games tend to be pretty lengthy, especially in terms of how RL problems typically are, which means that strategy tends to be hard with a pretty delayed payoff. You might rotate into a particular lane in order to take an objective that you might not be able to take until a minute or a minute and a half later. It’s something that’s kind of like hard to associate your actions with the direct rewards that you end up getting from them.

Brooke Chan: Additionally, as opposed to games like Go and chess, Dota has partial information to it, which means that you only get vision around you and your allies. You don’t have a full state of the game. You don’t know where your enemies are and this leads to more realistic decision-making, similar to our world where you can’t like see behind walls. You can’t see beyond what your actual vision gives you.

Brooke Chan: Then, finally, it has both a large action and observation space. It’s not necessarily solvable just by considering all the possibilities. There’s about 1,000 actions that you can take at any given moment and the state you’re getting back has the value size of about 20,000. To put it in perspective, on average, your game of chess takes about 40 moves and Go takes about 150 moves and Dota is around 20,000 moves. That means that the entire duration of a game of chess really wouldn’t even get you out of the base in Dota.

Brooke Chan: This is a graph of our training process. On the left, you have workers that all play the game simultaneously. I know it’s not super readable but it’s not really important for this. Each game that they’re playing in the top left consists of two agents where an agent is considered like a snapshot of the training. The rollout workers are dedicated to these games and the eval workers who are on the bottom left are dedicated to testing games in between these different agents.

Brooke Chan: All the agents at the beginning of the training start off random. They’re basically picking their actions randomly, wandering around the map doing really awfully and not actually getting any reward. The machine in green is what’s called the optimizer so it parses in all of these rollout worker games and figures out how to update what we call the parameters which you can consider to be the core of its decision-making. It then passes these parameters back into the rollout workers and that’s how you create these continually improving agents.

Brooke Chan: What we do then is we take all of these agents and we play them against all the other agents in about 15,000 games in order to get a ranking. Each agent gets assigned a true skill, which is basically a score calculated on its win-loss records against all the other agents. Overall, in both training and evaluation, we’re really not exposing it to any kind of human play. The upside of this is that we’re not influencing the process. We know that they’re not just emulating humans and we’re not capping them out at a certain point or adding a ceiling on it based on the way that humans play.

Brooke Chan: The downside of that is that it’s incredibly slow. For the final bot that we had play against OG we calculated that it had about 45,000 years of training that went into it. Towards the end of training, it was consuming about approximately 250 years of experience per day. All of which we can really do because it’s in simulation and we can do it both asynchronously and sped up.

Brooke Chan: The first time they do get exposed to human play is during human evaluations. They don’t actually learn during any of these games because we are taking an agent, which is a snapshot and frozen in time and it’s not part of the training process. We started off playing against our internal team and our internal team was very much not impressive. I have us listed as 2K MMR, which is extremely generous. MMR means matchmaking rating which is a score that Valve assigns to the ranked play. It’s very similar to true skill. 2K is very low.

Brooke Chan: We were really quickly surpassed. We then moved on to contract teams who were around like 4K-6K MMR and they played each week and were able to give us feedback. Then in the rare opportunities, we got to play against professional teams and players. Overall, our team knew surprisingly little about Dota. I think there are about four people on our team who had ever played Dota before and that’s still true post-project, that no one really plays Dota.

Brooke Chan: This leads us to our very surprising discovery that complicated games are really complicated and we dug ourselves into this hole. We wanted a really complicated game and we definitely got one. Since the system was learning in a completely different way than humans, it became really hard to interpret what it was actually trying to do and not knowing what it was trying to do mean we didn’t know if it was doing well, if it was doing poorly, if it was doing the right thing. This really became a problem that we faced throughout the lifetime of our project.

Brooke Chan: Having learned this, there was no way to really ask it what it was thinking. We had metrics and we could surface like stats from our games but we were always leveraging our own intuition in order to interpret what decisions it was making. On the flip side, we also had human players that we could ask, but it turned out it was sometimes tough to get feedback from human players.

Brooke Chan: Dota itself is a really competitive game, which means that its players are very competitive. We got a lot of feedback immediately following games, which would be very biased or lean negatively. I can’t even count the number of times that a human team would lose maybe like, “Oh, this bot is terrible” and I was like, “Well, you lost. How is it terrible? What is bad about it?” This would create this back and forth that led to this ultimate question of is it bad or is it just different? Because, historically, humans have been the source on how to play this game. They make up the pro scene, they make up the high skill players. They are always the ones that you are going to learn from. The bots would make a move and the humans say it was different and not how the pros play and therefore, it’s bad. We always had to take the human interpretation with this kind of grain of salt.

Brooke Chan: I want to elaborate a little bit more about the differences because it goes just beyond the format of how they learn. This game in general is designed to help humans understand the game. It has like tooltips, ability descriptions, item descriptions, et cetera. As an example, here’s a frozen frame of a hero named Rana who’s the one with the bright green bar in the bottom left. She has an ability that makes you go invisible and humans understand what being invisible means. It means people can’t see you.

Brooke Chan: On the right, what we see is where we have like what the AI sees and it’s considered their observation space, it’s our input from the game. We as engineers and researchers know that this particular value is telling you whether or not you’re invisible. When we hit this ability, you can see that she gets like this little glow to her which indicates that she’s invisible and people understand that. The AI uses this ability and sees that the flag that we marked as invisible goes from 0 to 1 but they don’t see the label for that and they don’t really even understand what being invisible means.

Brooke Chan: To be honest, learning invisibility is not something trivial. If you’re walking down the street and all of a sudden, you were invisible, it’s a little bit hard to tell that anything actually changed. If you’ve ever seen Sixth Sense, maybe there’s some kind of concept there, but additionally, at the same time, all these other numbers around it are also changing due to the fact that there’s a lot of things happening on the map at once.

Brooke Chan: Associating that invisibility flag, changing directly to you, activating the ability is actually quite difficult. That’s something that’s easy for a human to do because you expect it to happen. Not to say that humans have it very easy, the AI has advantages too. The AI doesn’t have human emotions like greed or frustration and they’re always playing at their absolute 100% best. They’re also programmatically unselfish which is something that we did. We created this hyper parameter called team spirit which basically says that you share your rewards with your buddy. If you get 10 gold or your buddy gets 10 gold, it’s totally interchangeable. Theoretically, in a team game, that should be the same case for humans but inherently, it’s not. People at its core are going to play selfishly. They want to be the carrier. They want to be winning the game for the team.

Brooke Chan: All these things are going to influence pretty much every decision and every behavior. One pretty good example we have of this is called buybacks. Buybacks is a mechanic where when you die in the game, you can pay money in order to immediately come back to life and get back on the map. When we first enabled the AI to do this, there was a lot of criticism that we got. People were saying, “Oh, that’s really bad. They shouldn’t be wasting all their money” because the bots would always buy back pretty much immediately.

Brooke Chan: Over time, we continue doing this behavior and people kept saying, “Oh, that’s bad. You should fix it.” We’re like, “Well, that’s what they want to do.” Eventually, people started seeing it as an advantage to what we had, as an advantage to our play style because we were able to control the map. We were able to get back there very quickly and we were able to then force more fights and more objectives from it.

Brooke Chan: As a second self-serving anecdote, at TI9, there were way more buybacks way earlier and some people pointed this out and maybe drew conclusions that it was about us but I’m not actually personally going to make any statement. But it is one example of the potential to really push this game forward.

Brooke Chan: This is why it was difficult to have human players give direct feedback on what was broken or why because they had spent years perfecting the shared understanding of the game that is just like inherently different than what the bots thought. As one of the few people that played Dota and was familiar with the game and the scene, in the time leading up to finals, this became my full-time job. I learned to interpret the bot and how it was progressing and I kind of lived in this layer between the Dota community and ML.

Brooke Chan: It became my job to figure out what was most critical or missing or different about our playstyle and then how to convert that into changes that we could shape the behavior of our bot. Naturally, being in this layer, I also fell into designing and executing all of our events and communication of our research to the public and the Dota community.

Brooke Chan: In designing our messaging, I had the second unsurprising discovery that understanding our project was a critical piece to being excited about our results. We could easily say, “Hey, we taught this bot to learn Dota” and people would say, “So what? I learned to play Dota too. What’s the big deal?” Inherently, it’s like the project is hard to explain because in order to understand it and be as excited as we were, you had to get through both the RL layer which is complicated, and the Dota layer which is also complicated.

Brooke Chan: Through planning our events, I realized this was something we didn’t really have a lot of practice on. This was the first time that we had a lot of eyes on us belonging to people with not a lot of understanding of reinforcement learning and AI. They really just wanted to know more. A lot of our content was aimed at people that came in with the context and people that were already in the field.

Brooke Chan: This led me to take the opportunity to do a rotation for six months on the communications team actually working under Ashley. I wanted to be part of giving people resources to understand our projects. My responsibilities are now managing upcoming releases and translating our technical results to the public. For me, this is a pretty new and big step. I’ve been an engineer for about 10 years now and that was always what I loved doing and what I wanted to do. But experience on this team and growing into a role that didn’t really exist at the time allowed me to tackle other sorts of problems and because that’s what we are as engineers at the core, we want to be problem solvers.

Brooke Chan: That’s kind of my takeaway and it might seem fairly obvious but sometimes deviating from your path and taking risks let you discover new problems to work on. They do say that growth tends to be at the inverse of comfort so that means that the more you push yourself out of your comfort zone and what you’re used to, the more you give yourself opportunities for new challenges and discovering new skills. Thank you.

Lilian Weng

Research Scientist Lilian Weng on the Robotics team gives a talk on how her team uses reinforcement learning to learn dexterous in-hand manipulation policies at OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Lilian Weng: Awesome. Cool. Today, I’m going to talk about some research projects with that at OpenAI robotics team. One big picture problem at our robotics team is to develop the algorithm to power general-purpose robots. If you think about how we humans are living this world, we can cook, we lift to move stuff, we add some more items with different tools. We fully utilize our body and especially our hands to do a variety of tasks. To some extent, we are general-purpose robots, okay?

Lilian Weng: That’s, we apply the same standard to our definition of such a thing. A general-purpose robot should be able to interact with a very complicated environment of the real world and able to manipulate all kinds of objects around it. However, unfortunately, most consumer-oriented robots nowadays are either just toys or very experimental or focus on specific functionalities and they are robots like factory arms or medical robots. They can interact with the environment and operating tools but they’re really operated by humans so human controls every move or they just play back a pre-programmed trajectory. They don’t really understand the environments and they cannot move autonomously.

Lilian Weng: In our projects, we’re taking a small step towards this goal and in this we try to teach a human-like robot hand to do in-hand manipulation by moving the objects. This is a six-phase block with OpenAI letters on it, move that to a target orientation. We believe this is an important problem because a human-like robot hand, it’s a universal effort. Imagine we can control that really well, we can potentially automate a lot of tasks that are currently done by human. Unfortunately, not a lot of progress have been made on human-like robot hand due to the complexity of such a system.

Lilian Weng: Why it is hard? Okay. First of all, the system has very high dimensionalities. For example, in our robot, which is as you can see this cool illustration. Shadow dexterity hand, it has 24 joints and 20 actuators. The task is especially hard because during the manipulation, a lot of observations are occluded and they can be noisy. For example, your sensor reading can be wrong and your sensor reading can be blocked by the object itself. Moreover, it’s virtually impossible to simulate your physical world 100% correctly.

Lilian Weng: Our approach for tackling this problem is to use reinforcement learning. We believe it is a great approach for learning how to control robots given that we have seen great progress and great success in many applications by reinforcement learning. You heard about OpenAI Five, the story of point AlphaGo and it will be very exciting to see how reinforcement learning can not only interact with this virtual world but also have an impact on our physical reality.

Lilian Weng: There is one big drawback of reinforcement learning model. In general, today, most of the models are not data efficient. You need a lot of training sample in order to get a good model trained. One potential solution is you build a robot farm. You just collect all the data in parallels with hundreds of thousands of robots but imagine just given how fragile a robot can be. It is very expensive to build and maintain. If you think of another problem, a new problem, or you want to work with new robots, it’s very hard to change. Furthermore, your data can get invalidated very quickly due to small changes in your robot status.

Lilian Weng: As that, we decided to take the sim2real approach, that is you train your model every single simulation but deploy that on physical robots. Here shows how we control the hand simulation. The hand is moving the object to a target orientation. The target is shown on the right so whenever the hand achieved the goal, we just sample a new goal. It just keeps on doing that and we cap the number of success at 50.

Lilian Weng: This is our physical setup. Everything is mounted in this giant metal cage. It’s like this big. The hand is mounted in the middle. It’s surrounded with a motion caption system. It’s actually the system that people use for filming special effects films, like the actor has dots on their bodies, kind of similar. This system tracks the five fingertip positions in the 3D space. We also have three high-resolution cameras for capturing images as input to our vision model. Our vision model predicts positional orientation of the block. However, our proposal sim2real approach might fail dramatically because there are a lot of model difference between simulation and reality. If your model all refer to the simulation, it can perform super poorly, the real robots.

Lilian Weng: In order to overcome this problem, we decided to take … we use reinforcement learning, okay. We train everything simulations so that we can generate technically, theoretically infinite amount of data. In order to overcome the sim2real difference, we use domain randomization.

Lilian Weng: Domain randomization refer to an idea of randomized different elements in simulation so that your policy can be exposed to a variety of scenarios and learn how to adapt. Eventually, we expand the policy to able to adapt to the physical reality.

Lilian Weng: Back in … This idea is relative news. I think they first proposed it in 2016. The researchers try to train a model to control drone like fly across furnitures or the indoor scenarios. They randomized the colors and texture of the walls and furnitures and without seeing any real-world images, they show that it performs pretty well in reality.

Lilian Weng: At OpenAI, we use the same approach to train a better model to protect the position orientation of the objects. As you can see some of the randomization looks totally unrealistic but somehow it worked very well when we feed the model with real images. Later, we also showed that you can randomize all the physical dynamics in simulations and this robot trained with domain randomization worked much better than the one without.

Lilian Weng: Let’s see the results. Okay. I’m going to click the … You really struggle a little bit at the first goal. Yes, okay. The ding indicates one success. This video will keep on going until goal 50 so it’s very, very long but I personally found it very soothing to look at it. I love it.

Lilian Weng: I guess that’s enough. This is our full setup of the training so in the box A, we generate a large number of environments in parallels in which we randomize the physical dynamics and the visual appearance. Based on those, we train two models independently. One is a policy model which takes in the fingertip position and object pose and the goal and output, a desired joint position of the hand so that we can control the hand. Another model is the vision that takes in three images from different camera angles and output the position orientation of the object.

Lilian Weng: When we deploy this thing into the real world, we combine the vision prediction based on the real images together with a fingertip position tracked by the motion capture system and feed that into our policy control model and output action so that then we just send it to the real robot and everything starts moving just like the movie shown. When we train our policy control model, we’ve randomized all kinds of physical parameter in the simulator such as masses, friction coefficient, motor gain, damping factor, as well as noise on the action, on observation. For a revision model, we randomized camera position, lighting, material, texture, colors, blah, blah, blah, and it just worked out.

Lilian Weng: For our model’s architecture, I’ll just go very quickly here. The policy, it’s a pretty simple recurrent unit. Has one layer of really connective layer and the LSTM. The vision model is a straightforward, multi-camera setup. All the three cameras share this RestNet stack and followed by a spatial softmax.

Lilian Weng: Our training framework is distributed and synchronized PBO, proximal policy optimization model. It’s actually the same framework used for training OpenAI Five. Our setup allowed us to generate about two years simulated experience per hour, which corresponds to 17,000 physical robots, so the gigantic robot factory and simulation is awesome.

Lilian Weng: When we deploy our model in reality, we noticed a couple of strategies learned by the robot like finger pivoting, sliding, finger gaiting. Those were also commonly used by human and interestingly, we never explicitly give it words or encouraged those strategies. They would just emerge autonomously.

Lilian Weng: Let’s see some numbers. In order to compare different versions of models, we deployed the models on the real robots and count how many successes the policy can get up to 50 before it dropped the block or time out. We first tried to deploy a model without randomization at all. It got a perfect performance in simulation but look, you can see it’s zero success median. Super bad on the real robot.

Lilian Weng: Then we’re adding domain randomization. The policy becomes much better because 13 success medians, maximum 50. Then we used RGB cameras in our vision model to track the objects. The performance only dropped slightly, still very good. The last one, I think this one’s very interesting because I just mentioned that our policies are recurrent units so like LSTM, it has internal memories.

Lilian Weng: Well, interesting, see how important this memory is so we replaced this LSTM policy with a FIFO or NAS and deployed that on robot and the performance dropped a lot, which indicates that memory play an important role in the sim2real transfers. Potentially, the policy might be using the memory and try to learn how to adapt.

Lilian Weng: However, training in randomized environments does come with a cost. Here we plot the number of success in simulation as a function of simulated experiencing measured in year. If you don’t apply randomization at all, the model can learn to achieve 40 success with about three years simulated experience but in order to get to same number like 40 success in a fully randomized environment took 100 years.

Lilian Weng: Okay, to quick summary. We’ve shown that this approach, reinforcement learning plus training simulation plus domain randomization worked on the real robot and we would like to push it forward. Thank you so much. Next one is Christine.

Christine Payne speaking

Research Scientist Christine Payne on the Music Generation team gives a talk on how MuseNet pushes the boundaries of AI creativity, both as an independent composer, and as a collaboration tool with human artists.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Christine Payne: Thank you. Let’s see. Thank you. It’s really great to see all of you here. After this talk, we’re going to take a short break and I’m looking forward to hopefully getting to talk to a lot of you at that point. I’ve also been especially asked to announce that there are donuts in the corner and so please help us out eating those.

Christine Payne: If you’ve been following the progress of deep learning in the past couple years, you’ve probably noticed that language generation has gotten much, much better, noticeably better in the last couple of years. But as a classical pianist, I wondered, can we take the same progress? Can we apply instead to music generation.

Christine Payne: Okay, I’m not Mira. Sorry. Hang on. One moment, I think we’re on the wrong slide deck. All right, sorry about that. Okay, trying again. Talking about music generation. You can imagine different ways of generating music and one way might be to do a programmatic approach where you say like, “Okay, I know that drums are going to be a certain pattern. Harmonies usually follow a certain pattern.” You can imagine writing rules like that but there’s whole areas of music that you wouldn’t be able to capture with that. There’s a lot of creativity, a lot of nuance, the sort of things that you really want a neural net to be able to capture.

Christine Payne: I thought I would dive right in by playing a few examples of MuseNet, which is this neural net that’s been trained on this problem of music generation. This first one is MuseNet trying to imitate Beethoven and a violin piano sonata.

Christine Payne: It goes on for a while but I’ll cut it off there. What I’m really trying to go with in this generation process is trying to get long-term structure so both the nuance and the intricacies of the pieces but also something that stays coherent over a long period of time. This is the same model but instead trying to imitate jazz.

Christine Payne: Okay, and I’ll cut this one off too. As you maybe could tell from those samples, I am more interested in the problem of composing the pieces themselves, so sort of where the notes should be and less in the actual quality of the solemnness and the timbre. I’ve been using a format that’s called MIDI which is an event-based system of writing music. It’s a lot like how you would write down notes in a music score. Like this note turns on at this moment in time played by this instrument maybe at this volume but you don’t know like this amazing cellist actually made it sound this way so I’m throwing out all of that kind of information.

Christine Payne: But the advantage of throwing that out is then you can get this longer-term structure. To build this sort of dataset, it involves a little bit of begging for data. I’ve had a bunch of people like BitMidi and ClassicalArchives were nice enough to just send me their collections and then a little bit of scraping and also MAESTRO’s Google Magenta’s dataset and then also a bunch of scraping online sets.

Christine Payne: The architecture itself, here I’m drawing really heavily from the way we do language modeling and so we use a specific kind of neural net that’s called a transformer architecture. The advantage of this architecture is that it’s specifically good at doing long-term structure so you’re able to look back not only at things that have happened in the recent past but really, you can look back like what happened in the music a minute ago or something like that, which is not possible with most other architectures.

Christine Payne: In the language world, I’d like to think of this, the model itself is trained on the task of what word is going to come next. It might initially see just like a question mark so it knows it’s supposed to start something. In English, we know like maybe it’s the or she or how or some like that. There’s some good guesses and there’s some like really bad guesses. If we know now the first word is hello then we’ve kind of narrowed down what we expect our next guesses should be. It might be how, it might be my, it’s probably not going to be cat. Maybe it could be cat. I don’t know.

Christine Payne: At this point, we’re getting pretty sure–like a trained model should actually be pretty sure that there should be a good 90% chance the next word is name and now it should be like really 100% sure or like 99.5% sure or whatever that the next word is going to be is. Then here we hit kind of an interesting branching point where there are tons of good answers so lots of names could be great answers here, lots of things could also be really bad answers so we don’t expect to see like some random verbs, some random … There are lots of things that we think would be bad choices but we get a point here to branch in good directions.

Christine Payne: The idea is once you have a model that’s really good at this, you can then turn it into a generator by sampling from the model according to those probabilities. The nice thing is you get the coherent structure. When you get a moment like this, you know like I have to choose … In music, it’s usually like I have to choose this rhythm, I have to choose … like if I choose the wrong note, it’s just going to sound bad, things like that. But then there are also a lot of points like this where the music can just go in fun and interesting different directions.

Christine Payne: But of course, now we have the problem of how do you translate words, how do you translate this kind of music into a sequence of words that the model can do. The system that I’m using is very similar to how MIDI itself works. I have a series of tokens that the model will always we see. Initially, it’ll always see the composer or the band or whoever wrote the piece. It’ll always see what instrument to expect in the piece or what set of instruments.

Christine Payne: Here, it sees the start token because it’s at the start of this particular piece and a tempo. Then as the piece begins, we have a symbol that this C and that C each turn on with a certain volume and then we have a token that says to wait a certain amount of time. Then as it moves forward, the volume zero means that first note just turned off and the G means the next note turns on. I think we have to wait and similarly, here the G turns off, the E turns on and we wait. You can just progress through the whole set of music like this.

Christine Payne: In addition to this token by token thing, I’m helping the model out a little bit by giving it a sense of the time that’s going on. I’m also giving it an extra embedding that says everything that happens in this purple line happens in the same amount of time or at the same moment in time. Everything in blue is going to get a different embedding that’s a little bit forward in time and so forth.

Christine Payne: The nice thing about an embedding or a system like this is that it’s pretty dense but also really expressive. This is the first page of a Chopin Ballade that is like actually encapsulates how the pianist played it, the volumes, the nuances, the timings, everything like that.

Christine Payne: The model is going to see that sequence of numbers like that. Like that first 1444 I think means it must mean Chopin and the next one probably means piano and the next one means start, that sort of thing. The first layer for the model, what it has to do is it needs to translate that number into a vector of numbers and then it can sort of learn a good vector that’ll represent so it’ll get a sense of like this is what it means to be Chopin or this is what it means to be like a C on a piano.

Christine Payne: The nice thing you can do once … The model will learn. Like initially it starts out with a totally random sense so it has no idea what those numbers should be but in the course of training, it’ll learn better versions of that. What you can do is you can start to map out what it’s learned for these embeddings. For example, this is what it’s learned for a piano scale like all the notes on a piano and it’s come to learn that like all of these As are kind of similar, that the notes relate to each other. This is like moving up on a piano. It’s hard to tell here but it’s learned little nuances like up a major third is closer than like up a tritone or stuff like that. Like actually really interesting musical stuff.

Christine Payne: Along with the same thing, given the fact that I’m always giving it this genre token and then the instrument token, you can look at the sort of embeddings it’s learned for the genres itself. Here, the embedding it’s learned for all these French composers. Ends up being pretty similar. I actually like that Ravel wrote like in the style of Spanish pieces and then there’s the Spanish composer that’s connected to him so like it makes a lot of good sense musically. Similarly, like over in the jazz domain, a lot of the ones. I think there are a couple of random ones that made no sense at all. I can’t remember now off the top of my head. It’s like Lady Gaga was connected to Wagner or something like but mostly, it made a lot of great sense.

Christine Payne: The other kind of fun thing you can do once you have the style tokens is you can try mismatching them. You can try things like literally taking 0.5 of the embedding for Mozart plus 0.5 of the embedding of jazz and just like adding them together and seeing what happens or in this case what I’m doing is I’m giving it the token for Bon Jovi, instruments for bands, but then I’m giving it the first six notes of a Chopin Nocturne. Then the model just has to generate as best it can at that point.

Christine Payne: You’ll hear at the start of this, it’s very much how the Chopin Nocturne itself sounds. I’ve cut off the very, very beginning of it but you’ll hear–so that left-hand pattern is going to be like straight out of Chopin and then well, you’ll see what happens.

Christine Payne: Sorry, it’s so soft but it gets very Bon Jovi at this point, the band kicks in. I always loved it like Chopin looks a little shocked but I really love that it manages to keep the left-hand pattern of the Nocturne going even though it’s like now thinks it’s in this pop sort of style.

Christine Payne: The other thing I’ve been interested in this project is in how musicians and everyone can use generators like this. If you go to our OpenAI blog you can actually play with the model itself. We’ve created, along with Justin and Eric and Nick, a sort of prototype tool of how you might co-compose pieces using this model. What you can do is you can specify the style and the instruments, how long a segment you want the model to generate and you hit start and the model will come back with four different suggestions of like how you might begin a piece in this style. You go through and you pick your favorite one, you hit the arrow again to keep generating and the model will come up with four new different ways. You can continue on this way as long as you want.

Christine Payne: What I find kind of fun about this is you’re actually really … like it feels like I’m composing but not at a note by note level and so I was really interested in how humans will be able to, and musicians will be able to guide composing this way. Just kind of wrapping up, I thought I would play an example of … This is one guy who took both GPT-2 to write the lyrics, which I guess is hence the Covered in Cold Feet and then MuseNet to do the music. It’s a full song but I’ll just play the beginning of it that he then recorded himself.

Christine Payne: (singing)

Christine Payne: Visit the page to hear the whole song but it’s been really fun to see those versions. The song, I ended up singing it the entire day. It gets really catchy but it’s been really fun to see musicians start to use it. People have used it to finish composing symphonies or to write full pieces, that sort of thing.

Christine Payne: In closing, I just wanted to share I’ve gone through this crazy path of two years ago being a classical pianist to now doing AI research here and I just wanted to … I didn’t know that Rachel was going to be right here. Give a shout out to fast.ai. She’s the fast.ai celebrity here but yeah. This has been my path, been doing it. These are the two courses I particularly love, fast.ai and deeplearning.ai and then I also went through OpenAI’s Scholars program and then the Fellows Program. Now I’m working here full-time, but happy to talk to anybody here if they’re interested in this sort of thing.

Christine Payne: The kind of fun thing about AI is that there’s so much that’s still wide open and it’s really helpful to come from different backgrounds where you bring a … It’s amazing how if you bring a new perspective or a new insight, there are a lot of things that are still just wide open that you can figure out how to do. I encourage anyone to come and check it out. We’ll have a concert. Thank you.

Mira Murati speaking

RL Team Manager Mira Murati gives a talk about reinformatiion learning and industry trends at OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner.   Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X 

Mira Murati: Hey, everyone, I’m Mira Murati and I’ll talk a little bit about the advancements in reinforcement learning from the lens of our research team here at OpenAI. Maybe I’ll kick things off by just telling you a bit about my background and how I ended up here.

Mira Murati: My background is in mechanical engineering but most of my work has been dedicated to practical applications of technology. Here at OpenAI, I work on Hardware Strategy and partnerships as well as managing our Reinforcement Learning research team alongside John Schulman, who is our lead researcher. I also manage our Safe Reinforcement Learning team.

Mira Murati: Before coming to OpenAI, I was leading the product and engineering teams at Leap Motion, which is a company that’s focused on the issue of human machine interface. The challenge with the human machine interface, as you know, is that we’ve been enslaved to our keyboard and mouse for 30 years, basically. Leap Motion was trying to change that by increasing the bandwidth of interaction with digital information such that, just like you see here, you can interact … Well, not here, with the digital space in the same natural and high bandwidth way that you interact with your physical space. The way you do that is using computer vision and AI to track your fingers in space and bring that input in virtual reality or augmented reality in this case.

Mira Murati: Before that, I was at Tesla for almost three years leading the development and launch of the Model X. That’s enough about me. I’ll touch a bit about on the AI landscape as a whole, just to offer a bit of context on the type of work that we’re doing with our Reinforcement Learning team. Then I’ll talk a bit about the impact of this work, the rate of change in the field as well as the challenges ahead.

Mira Murati: As you know, the future has never been bigger business. Every day we wake up to headlines like this and a lot of stories talking about the ultimate conversions where all the technologists come together to create the ultimate humankind dimension, that of general artificial intelligence. We wonder what this is going to do to our minds and to our societies, our workplaces and healthcare. Even politicians and cultural commentators are aware of what’s happening with AI to some extent, and politicians like this, to the extent that there’s a lot of nations out there that have published their AI strategies.

Mira Murati: There is definitely a lot of hype, but there is also a ton of technological advancement that’s happening. You might be wondering what what’s driving these breakthroughs. Well, so a lot of advancements in RL are driving the field forward and my team is working on some of these challenges through the lens of reinforcement learning.

Mira Murati: Both Brooke and Lilian did a great job going over reinforcement learning so I’m not going to touch too much upon that, but basically, to reiterate, it is you’re basically learning through trial and error. To provide some context for our work, I want us to take a look at …

Mira Murati: Oh, okay. There’s music. I wanted to take a look at this video where first you see this human baby, nine months old, how he is exploring the environment around him. You see this super high degrees of freedom interaction with everything around him. I think this is four hours of play in two minutes. In some of the things that this baby does like handling all these subjects, rolling around all this stuff, this is almost impossible for machines to do as you saw from Lilian’s talk.

Mira Murati: Then … Well, he’s going to keep going, but let’s see. Okay, now that … What I want to show you is … Okay, this is not working, but basically, I wanted you to show you that by contrast, so you have this video game over there where you would see this AI agent that’s basically trying to cross this level and makes the same mistakes over and over again. The moral of the story is that AI agents are very, very limited when they’re exploring their environment. Human babies just nine months old have this amazing ability to explore their environment.

Mira Murati: The question is, why are humans so good at understanding the environment around them? Of course, humans … We have this baby running in the playground. Of course, humans are very good at transferring knowledge from one domain to another, but there is also prior knowledge from evolution and also, from your prior life experiences. For example, if you play a lot of board games and I asked you to play a new one that you have never seen before, you’re probably not going to start learning that new game from scratch. You will apply a lot of the heuristics that you have learned from the previous board game and utilize those to solve this new one.

Mira Murati: It’s precisely this ability to abstract, this conceptual knowledge that’s based on or learned from perceptual details of real life that’s actually a key challenge for our field right now and we refer to this as transfer learning.

Mira Murati: What’s the state of things? There’s been a lot of advancements in machine learning and particularly in reinforcement learning. As you heard from the talks earlier, new datasets drive a lot of the advancements in machine learning. Our Reinforcement Learning team built a suite of games, thousands of games, that in itself you think playing video games is not so useful, but actually, they’re a great test bed because you have a lot of problem-solving and also content that’s already there. It comes for free in a way.

Mira Murati: The challenge that our team has been going after is how can we solve a previously unseen game as fast as a human, or even faster, given prior experiences with similar games. The Gym Retro dataset helps us do that. I was going to say that some of the games look like this but the videos are not quite working. But in a way, the Gym Retro dataset, you can check it out on the OpenAI blog, emphasizes the weaknesses of AI which is that of grasping a new task quickly and the ability to generalize knowledge.

Mira Murati: Why do all these advancements matter and what do the trends look like? It’s now just a bit over 100 years after the birth of the visionary mathematician Alan Turing and we’re still trying to figure out how hard it’s going to be to get to general artificial intelligence. Machines have surpassed us at very specific tasks but the human brain sets a high bar for what’s AI.

Mira Murati: In the 1960s and ’70s, this high bar was a game of chess. Chess was long considered the summit of human intelligence. It was visual, tactical, artistic, intelligence, mathematical, and chess masters could remember every single game that they played, not to mention that of their competitors, and so you can see why chess became such a symbol of mastery or a huge achievement of the human brain. It combined insight and forward planning and calculation, imagination, intuition, and this was until 1996, when the Deep Blue machine, chess machine from IBM was able to beat Garry Kasparov. If you had brought someone from the 1960s to that day, they would be completely astonished that this had happened but in 1996, this did not elicit such a reaction because in a way, Deep Blue had cheated by utilizing the power of hardware of Moore’s law. It leveraged the advancements in hardware to beat Garry Kasparov at chess.

Mira Murati: In a way, this didn’t show so much the advancements in AI, but rather that chess was not the pinnacle of human intelligence. Then the human sights were set on the Chinese game of Go, which is much more complex and just with brute force, you’d be quite far from solving Go, the game of Go with brute force and where we stand with hardware today. Then of course, in 2016, we saw the DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol in Korea and that was followed by advancements in AlphaGo Zero. OpenAI robotics team of course, used some of the algorithms developed in the RL team to manipulate the cube and then we saw very recently, obviously, the Dota 5v5 beat the world champions.

Mira Murati: There’s been a very strong accelerating trend of advancements pushed by reinforcement learning in general. However, there’s still a long way to go. There are a lot of questions with reinforcement learning and in figuring out where the data is coming from and what actions do you take early on that get you the reward later. Also issues of safety, how do you learn in a safe way and also how do you continue to learn once you’ve gotten really good? Think of self-driving cars, for example. We’d love to get more people thinking about this type of challenges and I hope that some of you will join us in doing so. Thank you.

Amanda Askell speaking

Research Scientist Amanda Askell on the Policy team gives a talk on AI policy at OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Amanda Askell: Okay, can everyone hear me? Cool. We’ve had like a lot of talks on some of the technical work that’s been happening at OpenAI. This talk is going to be pretty introductory because I guess I’m talking about what is quite a new field, but as Ashley said at the beginning, it’s one of the areas that OpenAI focuses on. This is a talk on AI policy and I’m a member of the policy team here.

Amanda Askell: I realize now that this picture is slightly unfortunate because I’m going to give you some things that look like they’re being produced by a neural net when in fact this is just an image because I thought it looked nice.

Amanda Askell: The core claims behind why we might want something like AI policy to exist in the world are really simple. Basically, AI has the potential to be beneficial. Hopefully, we can agree with this. We’ve had lots of talks showing how excellent AI can be and things that it can be applied to. AI also has the potential to be harmful so I’ll talk a little bit about this in the next slide but you know we hear a lot of stories about systems that just don’t behave the way that they’re creators intended to when they’re deployed in the world, systems that can be taken over by people who want to use them for malicious purposes. Anything that has this ability to do great things in the world can also be either misused or lead to accidents.

Amanda Askell: We can do things that increase the likelihood that AI will be beneficial so hopefully, that’s also fairly agreed-upon. But also that this includes making sure that the environment the AI is developed in is one that incentivizes responsible development. They’re like nontechnical things that we can do to make sure that AI is beneficial.

Amanda Askell: I think these are all like really simple and this leads to this idea that we should be doing some work in known technical fields just to make sure that AI is developed responsibly and well. Just to like kind of reiterate the claims of the previous slide, the potential benefits of AI are obviously kind of huge and I feel like to this audience I don’t really need to sell them but we can go over them. You know language models provide the ability potentially to assist with writing and other day-to-day tasks.

Amanda Askell: We can see that we can apply them to large complex problems like climate change potentially. This is the kind of like hope for things like a large scale ML. We might be able to enable like innovations In healthcare and education so we might be able to use them for things like diagnosis or finding new treatments for diseases. Finally, they might drive the kind of economic growth that would reduce the need to do work that people don’t find fulfilling. I think this is probably controversial. This is one thing that’s highly debated in AI ethics but I will defend it. I’ve done lots of unfulfilling work in my life and if someone could just pay me to not do that, I would have taken that.

Amanda Askell: Potential harms like language models of the same sort could be used to like misinform people by malicious actors. There are concerns about facial recognition as it improves and privacy. People are concerned about automation and unemployment if it’s not dealt with well. Like does this just lead to massive unfairness and inequity? Then people are also worried about things like decision making and bias. We already see in California that there’s ML systems being used for things like decisions about bail being set but also historically, we’ve used a lot of systems for things like whether someone gets credit. I mean so whether your loan’s approved or not given that there’s probably a huge amount of bias in the data and that we don’t know yet how to completely eliminate that, this could be really bad and it could increase systemic inequity in society, so that’s bad.

Amanda Askell: We’re also worried about like AI weapons and global security. Finally, just like a general misalignment of future AI systems. A lot of these are just like very classic examples of things that people are thinking about now, but this should just … We could expect this to be the sort of problems that we just see on an ongoing basis in the future as systems get more powerful.

Amanda Askell: I don’t think AI is like any different from many other technologies in at least some respects here. How do we avoid building things that are harmful? Doing the same kind of worries just apply to like the aviation industry. Planes can also be taken over by terrorists. Planes can be built badly and lead to accidents. The same is true of like cars or pharmaceuticals or like many other technologies with the potential to do good, it can end up … There can be accidents. It can be harmful.

Amanda Askell: In other industries we invest in safety, we invest in reducing accidents, we invest in security, so that’s like reducing misuse potential, and we also invest in social impact. In case of aviation, we know are concerned about things like the impact that flying might have on the climate. This is like the kind of third sort of thing that people invest in a lot.

Amanda Askell: All of this is very costly so this is just a kind of intro to like one way in which we might face problems here. I’m going to use a baking analogy, mainly because I was trying to think of a different one and I had used this one previously and I just couldn’t think of a better one.

Amanda Askell: The idea is, imagine you’ve got a competition and the nice thing about baking competitions, maybe I just have watched too many of them, is like you care both about the quality of what you’re creating and also about how long it takes to create it. Imagine a baking competition where you can just take as much time as you want and you’re just going to be judged on the results. There’s no race, like you don’t need to hurry, you’re just going to focus purely on the quality of the thing that you’re creating.

Amanda Askell: But then you introduce this terrible thing, which is like a time constraint or even worse, you can imagine you make it a race. Like the first person to develop the bake just gets a bunch of extra points. In that case, you’re going to be like well, I’ll trade off some of the quality just to get this thing done faster. You trade off some quality for increased speed.

Amanda Askell: Basically, we can expect something similar to happen with things like investment in areas like the areas that I talked about in the previous slide, where it’s like it might be that I would want to just like continue investing and making sure that my system is secure essentially like forever. I just never want someone to misuse this system so if I was given like 100 years, I would just keep working on it. But ultimately, I need to produce something. I do need to put something out into the world and the concern that we might have is that competition could drive down the incentive to invest that much in security.

Amanda Askell: This, again, happens across lots of other industries. This is like not isolated to AI and so there’s a question of like, what happens here? How do we ensure that companies invest in things like safety? I’m going to argue that there are four things. Some of the literature might not mention this one but I think it’s really important. The first one is ethics. People and companies are surprisingly against being evil. That’s good, that’s important. I think this gets not talked about enough. Sometimes we talk like the people that companies would just be totally happy turning up at like 9:00 a.m. to build something that would cause a bunch of people harm. I just don’t think that people think like that. People are … I have fundamental faith in humanity. I think we’re all deeply good.

Chloe Lin software engineer OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner

Software Engineer Chloe Lin listens to the OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner speakers answer audience questions.  Photo credit: Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Amanda Askell: It’s really great to align your incentives with your ethical beliefs and so regulation is obviously one other component that’s there to do that. We create these regulations and industry norms to basically make sure that if you’re like building planes and you’re competing with your competitor, you still just have to make your planes. You have to establish that they reach some of … Tripped over all of those words.

Amanda Askell: You have to establish that they reach some level of safety and that’s what regulation is there for. There’s also liability law and so companies have to compensate who are harmed by failures. This is another thing that’s driving that incentive to make sure your bake is not going to kill the judges. Well, yeah, everyone will be mad at you and also, you’ll have to pay a huge amount of money.

Amanda Askell: Finally, the market. People just want to buy safe products from companies with good reputations. No one is going to buy your bake if they’re like, “Hang on, I just saw you drop it on the floor before you put it into the oven. I will pay nothing for this.” These are four standard mechanisms that I think are used to like ensure that safety is like pretty high even in the cases of competition between companies in other domains like aviation and pharmaceuticals.

Amanda Askell: Where are we with this on AI? I like to be optimistic about the ethics. I think that coming to a technology company and seeing the kind of tech industry, I’ve actually been surprised by the degree to which people are very ethically engaged. Engineers care about what they’re building. They see that it’s important. They generally want it to be good. This is more like a personal kind of judgment on this where I’m like actually, this is a very ethically engaged industry and that’s really great and I hope that continues and increases.

Amanda Askell: With regulation, currently there are not many industry-specific regulations. I missed an s there but speed and complexity make regulation more difficult. The idea is that regulation is very good when there’s not an information asymmetry between the regulator and the entity being regulated. It works much less well when there is a big information asymmetry there. I think in the case of ML, that does exist. It’s very hard to both keep up with like, I think for regulators keeping up with contemporary ML work is really hard and also, the pace is really fast. This makes it actually quite difficult as an area to build very good regulation in.

Amanda Askell: Liability law is another thing where it’s just like a big question mark because like for ML accidents and misuse, in some cases it’s just unclear what existing law would say. If you build a model and it harms someone because it turns out that there was data in the model that was biased and that results in a loan being denied to someone, who is liable for that harm that is generated? You get easier and harder cases of this, but essentially, a lot of the kind of … I think that contemporary AI actually presents a lot of problems with liability law. It will hopefully get sorted out, but in some cases I just think this is unclear.

Amanda Askell: Finally, like market mechanisms. People just need to know how safe things are for market mechanisms to work well. In the case of like a plane, for example, I don’t know how safe my planes are. I don’t go and look up the specs. I don’t have the engineering background that would let me actually evaluate, say, a new plane for how safe it is. I just have to trust that someone who does know this is evaluating how safe those planes are because there’s this big information gap between me and the engineers. This is also why I think we shouldn’t necessarily expect market mechanisms to do all of the work with AI.

Amanda Askell: This is to lead up to this … to show that there’s a broader problem here and I think it also applies in the case of AI. To bring in a contemporary example, like recently in the news, there’s been concern. Vaping is this kind of like new technology that is currently not under the purview of the FDA or at least generally not heavily regulated. Now there’s concern that it might be causing pretty serious illnesses in people across the US.

Amanda Askell: I think this is a part of a more broad pattern that happens a lot in industries and so I want to call this the reactive route to safety. Basically, a company does the thing, the thing harms people. This is what you don’t want on your company motto. Do the thing. The thing harms people. People stop buying it. People sue for damages. Regulators start to regulate it. This would be really uninspiring as your company motto.

Amanda Askell: This is actually a very common route to making things more safe. You start out and there’s just no one who’s there to make sure that this thing goes well and so it’s just up to people buy it, they’re harmed, they sue, regulators get really interested because suddenly your product’s clearly harming people. Is this a good route for AI? Reasons against hope … I like the laugh because I’m like hopefully, that means people agree like no, this would be terrible. I’m just like well, one reason, just to give like the additional things of like obviously that’s kind of a bad way to do things anyway.

Amanda Askell: AI systems can often be quite broadly deployed almost immediately. It’s not like you just have some small number of people who are consuming your product who could be harmed by it in a way that a small bakery might. Instead, you could have a system where you’re like I’ve built the system for determining whether someone should get a loan. In principle, almost every bank in the US could use that the next day and that’s –The potential for widespread deployment makes it quite different from technologies where you just have a really or like any product where you have just like a small base of people.

Amanda Askell: They have the potential for a really high impact. The loan system that I just talked about could, basically, could in principle really damage the lives of a lot of people. Like apply that to things like bail systems as well, which we’re already seeing and even potentially with things like misinformation systems.

Amanda Askell: Finally, in a lot of cases it’s just difficult to attribute the harms and if you have something that’s spreading a huge amount of misinformation, for example, and you can’t directly attribute it to something that was released, this is concerning because it’s not like this route might work. This route actually requires you to be able to see who caused the harm and whenever that’s not visible, you just don’t expect this to actually lead to good regulation.

Amanda Askell: Finally, I just want to say I think there are alternatives to this reactive break things first approach in AI and this is hopefully where a lot of policy work can be useful.

Amanda Askell: Just to give a brief overview of policy work at OpenAI. I think I’m going to start with the policy team goals just to give you the sense of what we do. We want to increase the ability of society to deal with increasingly advanced AI technology, both through information and also through pointing out mechanisms that can make sure that technology is safe and secure and that it does have a good social impact. We conduct research into long-term issues related to AI and AGI so we’re interested in what happens when these systems become more powerful. Not merely reacting to systems that already exist, but trying to anticipate what might happen in the future and what might happen as systems get more powerful and the kind of policy problems and ethical problems that would come up then.

Amanda Askell: Finally, we just help OpenAI to coordinate with other AI developers, civil society, policymakers, et cetera, around this increasingly advanced technology. In some ways trying to break down these information asymmetries that exist and it can cause all of these problems.

Amanda Askell: Just to give a couple of examples of recent work from the teams to the kind of thing that we do. We released a report recently with others on publication norms and release strategies in ML. Some of you will know about like the GPT-2 language release and the decision to do staged release. We discussed this in the recent report. We also discussed other things like the potential for bias in language models and some of the potential social impacts of large language models going forward.

Amanda Askell: We also wrote this piece on cooperation and responsible AI development. This is related to the things I talked about earlier about the potential for competition to push this bar for safety too low and some of the mechanisms that can be used to help make sure that that bar for safety is raised again.

Amanda Askell: Finally, since this is an introduction to this whole field, which is like new and emerging field, here are examples of questions I think are really interesting and broad but can be broke down to these very specific applicable questions. What does it mean for AI systems to be safe, secure, and beneficial and how can we measure this? This includes a lot of traditional AI ethics work, like my background is in ethics. A lot of these questions about like how you make a system fair and what it means for a system to be fair. I would think of that as falling under the what is it for a system to be socially beneficial, and I think that work is really interesting. I do think that there’s just this broad family of things there are like policy and ethics and governance. I don’t think of these as separate enterprises.

Amanda Askell: Hence, this is an example of why. What are ways that AI systems could be developed that could be particularly beneficial or harmful? Again, trying to anticipate future systems and ways that we might just not expect them to be harmful and they are. I think we see this with the existing technology. Maybe it’s like trying to anticipate the impact that technology will have is really hard but like given the huge impact that technology is now having, I think trying to do some of that research in advance is worthwhile.

Amanda Askell: Finally, what can industry policymakers and individuals do to ensure that AI is developed responsibly? This relates to a lot of the things that I talked about earlier, but yeah, what kind of interventions can we have now? Are there ways that we can inform people that would make this stuff all go well?

Amanda Askell: Okay, last slide except the one with my email on it, which is the actual last slide. How can you help? I think that there’s this interesting, this is just like … I think that this industry is very ethically engaged and in many ways, it can feel like people feel like they need to do the work themselves. I know that a lot of people in this room are probably engineers and researchers. I think the thing I would want to emphasize is, you can be really ethically engaged and that doesn’t mean you need to take this whole burden on yourself.

Amanda Askell: One thing you can also do is advocate for this work to be done, either in your company, or just anywhere where people are like … in your company, in academia or just that your company is informed of this stuff. But in general, helping doesn’t necessarily have to mean taking on this massive burden of learning an entire field yourself. It can just mean advocating for this work being done. At the moment, this is a really small field and I would just love to see more people working in it. I think advocacy is really important but I also think another thing is you can technically inform people who are working on this.

Amanda Askell: We have to work closely with a lot of the teams here and I think that’s really useful and I think that policy and ethics work is doing its best, basically, when it’s really technically informed. If you find yourself working in a position where a lot of the things that you’re doing feel like they are important and would benefit from this sort of work, like helping people who are working on it is a really excellent way of helping. It’s not the only thing that you can do is spend half of your time doing the work that I’m doing and the others on the team are doing. You can also get people like us to do it. We love it.

Amanda Askell: If you’re interested in this, so thank you very much.

Brooke Chan, Amanda Askell, Lilian Weng, Christine Payne, Ashley Pilipiszyn

OpenAI girl geeks: Brooke Chan, Amanda Askell, Lilian Weng, Christine Payne and Ashley Pilipiszyn answer questions at OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X 

Audience Member:  I have a question.

Amanda Askell: Yes.

Audience Member: For Amanda.

Amanda Askell: Yes.

Audience Member: Drink your water first. No, I think the ethics stuff is super interesting. I don’t know of a lot of companies that have an ethics department focused on AI, and I guess one thing that I’m curious about is, like you pointed out like your papers but like, and I know you talked about educating and all this other stuff but what are you guys…do? Do you know what I mean? Other than write papers.

Amanda Askell: Yeah.

Ashley Pilipiszyn: Oh, Christine.

Amanda Askell: Which one? Yeah, so I think at the moment there’s like a few kind of rules. I can say what we do but also what I think that people in these roles can do. So in some cases it can be like looking at what you’re building internally. I think we have like the charter and so you want to make sure that everything that you’re doing is in line with the charter. Things like GPT-2 and release decisions, I think of as a kind of like ethical issue or ethical/policy issue where I would like to see the ML community build really good norms there. Even if people don’t agree with what OpenAI try to do with its release decisions, it was coming from a place of trying to build good norms and so you can end up thinking about decisions like that.

Amanda Askell: That’s more of an example of something where you’re like it’s not writing a paper, it’s just like thinking through all of the consequences of different publication norms and what might work and what might not. That’s like one aspect, that’s the kind of like internal component. I think of the external component as like, on the one hand it’s just like writing papers so just being like what are the problems here that people could work on and in a lot ways that’s just like outreach, like trying to get people who are interested in working on this to work on it further. For that, there’s a few audiences, so you might be interested in attracting people to the field if you think that there are these like ongoing problems within both companies and maybe with other relevant actors. Like maybe you also want people going into government on this stuff.

Amanda Askell: But also just like the audience can be internal, to make people aware of these issues and they can also be things like policymakers, just inform of the kind of structure of the problem here. I think of it as having this kind of internal plus external component and you can end up dividing your time between the two of them. We spend some time writing these papers and trying to get people interested in these topics and just trying to solve the problems. That’s the nice thing about papers is you can just be like, what’s the problem, I will try and solve it and I’ll put my paper of an archive. Yeah, and so I think there’s both of those.

Amanda Askell: It’s obviously fine for companies to have people doing both, like if you haven’t and I think it’s like great if a company just has a team that’s just designed to look at what they’re doing internally and if anyone has ethical concerns about it, that team can take that on and own it and look at it. I think that’s a really good structure because it means that people don’t feel like … if you’re like just having to raise these concerns and maybe feel kind of isolated, that’d be bad but if you have people that you know are thinking about it, I think that’s a really good thing. Yeah, internal plus external, I can imagine different companies liking different things. I hope that answers the question.

Rose: My question is also for Amanda. So the Google AI Ethics Board was formed and disbanded very quickly kind of famously within like the span of less than a month. How do you kind of think about that like in the context of the work that OpenAI is doing and like how do you think about like what they failed at and like what we can do better?

Amanda Askell: This was a really difficult case so I can give you … I remember personally kind of looking at this and being like I think that one thing that was in it … I don’t know if people know the story about this case but basically, it was that Google formed a board and they were like, “We want this to be intellectually representative,” and it garnered a lot criticism because it had a person who was head of the Heritage Foundation, so a conservative think-tank in the US, as one of its members, and this was controversial.

Amanda Askell: I remember having mixed views on this, Rose. I do think it’s great to … Ultimately, these are systems that are going to affect a huge number of people and that includes a huge number of people who have views on how they should be used and how they should affect them. They’re just very different from me and I want those people to be represented and I want their views on how they do or do not want systems to affect them to be at the table. We talked earlier about the importance of representativeness and I genuinely believe that for people who have vastly different views for myself. If they’re affected by it, ultimately, their voice matters.

Amanda Askell: At the same time, I think I also … there’s a lot of complicating–you’re getting my just deeply mixed emotions here because I was like, there’s a strange sense in which handpicking people to be in the role of a representative of a group where you’re like, I don’t know, we select who the intellectual representatives are also struck me as somewhat odd. It’s a strange kind of … It set off my old political philosophy concerns where I’m like, “Oh, this just doesn’t …” It feels like it’s imitating democracy but isn’t getting there. I had and I was also just like plus the people who come to the table and there are certain norms of respect to lots of groups of people that just have to be upheld if you’re going to have people with different views have an input on a topic.

Amanda Askell: I think some of the criticisms were that people felt those norms had been upheld and this person had been insulting to key groups of people, the trans community and to immigrants. Largely, mixed feelings where I was just like I see this intention and it actually seems to me to be a good one, but I see all of these problems with trying to execute on it.

Amanda Askell: I can’t give an awesome response to this. It’s just like yeah, here it is, I’ve nailed it. It’s just like yeah, these are difficult problems and I think if you came down really strongly on this where it was like this was trivially bad or you were like this was trivially good, it just feels no, they were just like there are ways that I might have done this differently but I see what the goal was and I’m sympathetic to it but I also see what the problems were and I’m sympathetic to those. Yeah, it’s like the worst, the least satisfying answer ever, I guess.

OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner audience women in AI.

OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner audience enjoys candor from women in AI.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu  / Girl Geek X

Audience Member: Hi, I have a question for Brooke. I’m also a fan of Dota and I watched TI for two years. My question is, if your model can already beat the best team in the world, what is your next goal?

Brooke Chan: Currently, we’ve stopped the competitive angle of the Dota project because really what we wanted to achieve was to show that we could get to that level. We could get to superhuman performance on a really complex game. Even at finals, we didn’t necessarily solve the whole game because there were a lot of restrictions, which people brought up. For example, we only used 17 out of the you know 100 and some heroes.

Brooke Chan: From here, we’re just looking to use Dota more as a platform for other things that we want to explore because now we know that it’s something that is trainable and can be reused in other environments, so yeah.

Audience Member: Hi, my question is about what are some of the limitations of training robots in a simulator?

Lilian Weng: Okay, let me repeat. Question is, what’s a limitation of training the robot-controlled models in the simulation? Okay, there are lots of benefits, I would say, because in simulation, you have the ground rules. You know exactly where the fingertips are, you know exactly what’s the joint involved. We can do all kinds of randomization modification of the environment. The main drawback is we’re not sure what’s the difference between our simulated environment and reality. Our eventual goal is to make it work in reality. That’s the biggest problem. That’s also what decides whether our sim2real transfer going to work.

Lilian Weng: I will say one thing that confuse me or puzzles me personally the most is when we are running all kinds of randomizations, I’m not sure whether it’s getting us closer to the reality because we don’t have a good measurement of what the reality looks like. But one thing I didn’t emphasize a lot in the talk is we expect because we design all kinds of environment in the simulation and we asked the policy model to master all of them. There actually emerges some meta learning effect, which we didn’t emphasize but with meta learning, your model can learn how to learn. We expect this meta learning in fact to empower the model to handle something they’d never seen before.

Lilian Weng: That is something we expect with domain randomization that our model can go above what it has seen in the simulation and eventually adapt to the reality. We are working all kinds of technique to make the sim2real thing happen and that’s definitely the most difficult thing for robotics because it’s easy to make things work in simulation. Okay, thanks.

Audience Member: I was just curious as kind of another follow-up question to Brooke’s answer for earlier but for everybody on the panel too. What do you consider to be some of the longer-term visions for some of your work? You did an impressive thing by having Dota beat some real people but where would you like to see that work go or what kinds of problems do you think you could solve with that in the future too, and for some other folks on the panel too?

Brooke Chan: Sure, I would say that pretty honestly when we started the Dota project we didn’t actually know whether or not we would be able to solve it. The theory at the time was that we would need a much more powerful algorithm or a different architecture or something in order to push it kind of all the way. The purpose of the project was really to demonstrate that we could use a relatively straightforward or simple algorithm in order to work on this complex game.

Brooke Chan: I think going out from here, we’re kind of looking into environments in general. We talked about how Dota might be one of our last kind of games because games are still limited. They’re helpful and beneficial in that you can run them in simulation, you can run them faster but we want to kind of also get closer to real-world problems. Dota was one step to getting to real-world problems in the parts that I talked about like the partial information and the large action space and things like that. Going on from there, we want to see what other difficult problems you could also kind of apply this sort of things to. I don’t know if other people …

Christine Payne: Sure. In terms of a music model, I would say kind of two things I find fascinating. One is that I really like the fact that it’s this one transformer architecture which we’re now seeing apply to lots of different domains. The fact that it can both do language and music and it’s really kind of interesting to find these really powerful algorithms that it doesn’t care what it’s learning, it’s just learning. I think that that’s going to be really interesting path going forward.

Christine Payne: Then, also, I think that music is a really interesting test for like we have a lot of sense as humans so we know how we would want the music to go or we know how the music affects us emotionally or there’s all this sort of human interaction that we can explore in the music world. I hear from composers saying well, they want to be able to give the shape of the music or give the sense of it or the emotion of it, and I think there’s a lot of space to explore in terms of it’s the same sort of thing we’ll want to be able to influence the way any program is going to be, how we’ll be interacting with a program in any field but music is a fun area to play with it.

Ashley Pilipiszyn: Actually, as a followup, if you look at all of our panelists and everything everyone presented too, it’s not just human and AI interaction, but human and AI cooperation. Actually, for anyone who followed our Dota finals event as well, not only did we have a huge success but, and for anyone who is a Dota fan in the crowd, I’d be curious if anyone participated in our co-op challenge. Anyone by chance? No, all right. That’s all right.

Ashley Pilipiszyn: But actually, being able to insert yourself as being on a team with OpenAI Five and I think from all of our research here we’re trying to explore the boundaries of, you know what does human AI cooperation look like and I think that’s going to be a really important question going forward so we’re trying to look at that more.

Speaker: And we have time for two more questions.

Audience Member: Thank you. Just right on time. I have a question for you, Christine. I was at a conference earlier this year and I met this person named Ross Goodwin who wrote using a natural language processing model that he trained a screenplay. I think it’s called Sunspring or something like that. It’s a really silly script that doesn’t make any sense but it’s actually pretty fun to watch. But he mentioned that in the media it’s been mostly–the credit was given to an AI wrote this script and his name was actually never mentioned even though he wrote the model, he got the training data. What is your opinion on authorship in these kinds of tools that … also the one you mentioned where you say you’re actually composing? Are you the composer or is the AI the composer? Should it be like a dual authorship?

Christine Payne: That is a great question. It’s a difficult question that I’ve tried to explore a little bit. I’ve actually tried to talk with lawyers about what is copyright going to look like? Who owns pieces like this? Because in addition to who wrote the model and who’s co-composing or co-writing something, there’s also who’s in the dataset. If your model is imitating someone like are they any part of the author in that?

Christine Payne: Yeah, I mean I have my own sort of guesses of where I think it might go but every time … I think I’m a little bit [inaudible 01:37:11] in terms of the more you think about it, the more you’re like this is a hard problem. It’s really, like if you come down hard on one side or the other because clearly, you don’t want to be able to just press go and have the model just generate a ton of pieces and be like I now own all these pieces. You could just own a ridiculous number of pieces, but if you’re the composer who has carefully worked and crafted the model, crafted … you write a little bit of a piece, you write at some of the piece and then the model writes some and you write some. There’s some interaction that way, then sure, that should be your piece. Yeah, I think it’s something that we probably will see in the near future, law trying to struggle with this but it’s an interesting question. Thanks.

Audience Member:  Okay, last question. Oh no.

Ashley Pilipiszyn: We’ll also be around so afterwards you can talk to us.

Audience Member: This is also a followup question and it’s for everyone on the panel. Could you give us some examples of real-life use cases of your research and how that would impact our life?

Ashley Pilipiszyn: An example.

Christine Payne: It’s not an easy one to close on. You want to take it. Go for it.

Lilian Weng: I will say if eventually we can build general purpose robots, just imagine we use the robot to do a lot of dangerous tasks. I mean tasks that might seem danger to humans. That can definitely reduce the risk of human labors or doing repeated work. For example, on assembly line, there are some tasks that involve human hands, but kind of boring. I heard from a friend that there are a lot of churn or there’s a very high churn rate of people who are working on the assembly line, not because it’s low pay or anything, most because it’s very boring and repetitive.

Lilian Weng: It’s not really good for people’s mental health and they have to–like the factory struggle to hire enough people because lots of people will just leave their job after a couple months or half a year. If we can automate all those tasks, we’re definitely going to leave others more interesting and creative position for humans to do and I think that’s going to overall move the productivity of the society. Yeah. That’s still a very far-fetched goal. We’re still working on it.

Amanda Askell: I can also give a faraway thing. I mean I guess my work is,, you know with the direct application, I’m like, “Well, hopefully, ML goes really well.” Ideally, we have a world where all of our institutions are actually both knowledgeable of the work that’s going on in ML and able to react to them really well so a lot of the concerns that people have raised around things like what happens to authorship, what happens to employment, how do you prevent things like the misuse of your model, how can you tell it’s safe? I think if policy work goes really well then ideally, you live in a world where we’ve just made sure that we have all of the kind of right checks in place to make sure that you’re not releasing things that are dangerous or that can be misused or harmful.

Amanda Askell: That just requires a lot of work to ensure that’s the case, both in the ML community, and in law and policy. Ideally, the outcome of great policy work is just all of this goes really smoothly and awesomely and we don’t have any bad things happen. That’s like the really, really modest goal for AI policy work.

Brooke Chan: I had two answers on the short-sighted term, in terms of just AI being applied to video games, AI in video games historically is really awful. It’s either really just bad and scripted and you can beat it easily and you get nothing from it or it’s crazy good because it’s basically cheating at the game and it’s also not really that helpful. Part of what we found out through the Dota project was people actually really did like learning with the AI. When you have an AI that’s at your skill level or slightly above, you have a lot of potential, first of all, to have a really good competitor that you can learn from and work with, but also to be constantly challenged and pushed forward.

Brooke Chan: For a more longer-term perspective, I would leverage off of the robotics work and the stuff that Lilian is doing in terms of the system that we created in order to train our AI is what is more general and can be applied to other sorts of problems. For example, that got utilized a little bit for the robotics project as well and so I feel it’s more open-ended in that sense in terms of the longer-term benefits.

Christine Payne: Okay and I’ll just wrap up saying yeah, I’ve been excited already to see how musicians and composers are using MuseNet. There are a couple examples of performances that have happened now of MuseNet pieces and that’s been really fun to see. The main part that I’m excited about is that I think the model is really good at just coming up with lots and lots of ideas. Even though it’s imitating what the composers might be doing, it opens up possibilities of like, “Oh, I didn’t think that we could actually do this pattern instead.” Moving towards that domain of getting the best of human and the best of models I think is really fun to think about.

Ashley Pilipiszyn: So kind of how I started the event this evening, our three main research areas are really on these capabilities, safety, and policy. You’ve been able to hear that from everyone here. I think the big takeaway and a concrete example I’ll give you is, you think about your own experience going through primary education. You had a teacher and you most likely … you went to science class then you went to math class and then maybe music class and then art class and gym. You had a different teacher and they just assumed, probably for most people, you just assumed you’re all at the same level.

Ashley Pilipiszyn: How I think about it is, we’re working on all these different kind of pieces and components that are able to bring all of these different perspectives together and so a system that you’re able to bring in the math and the music and the gym components of it but also able to understand what level you’re at and personalize that. That’s kind of what I’m really excited about, is this human AI cooperation component and where that’ll take us and help unlock our own capabilities. I think, to quote from Greg Brockman, our CTO, that while all our work is on AI, it’s about the humans. With that, thank you for joining us tonight. We’ll all be around and would love to talk to you more. Thank you.

Speaker: We have a quick update from Christina on our recruiting team.

Ashley Pilipiszyn: Oh, sorry.

Christina Hendrickson: Hey, thanks for coming again tonight. I’m Christina. I work on our recruiting team and just briefly wanted to talk to you about opportunities at OpenAI. If you found the work interesting that you heard about from our amazing speakers tonight and would be interested in exploring the opportunities with us, we are hiring for a number of roles across research, engineering and non-technical positions.

Christina Hendrickson: Quickly going to highlight just a couple of the roles here and then you can check out more on our jobs page. We are hiring a couple roles within software engineering. One of them, or a couple of them are on robotics, so that would be working on the same type of work that Lillian mentioned. We are also hiring on our infrastructure team for software engineers, as well, where you can help us in building some of the world’s largest supercomputing clusters.

Christina Hendrickson: Then the other thing I wanted to highlight is one of our programs. So we are going to have our third class of our scholars program starting in early 2020. We’ll be opening applications for that in a couple weeks so sneak peek on that. What that is, is we’re giving out eight stipends to people who are members of underrepresented groups within engineering so that you can study ML full-time for four months where you’re doing self-study and then you opensource a project.

Christina Hendrickson: Yeah, we’re all super excited to chat with you more. If you’re interested in hearing about that, we have a couple recruiting team members here with us tonight. Can you all stand up, wave? Carson there in the back, Elena here in the front, myself. Carson and I both have iPads if you want to sign up for our mailing list to hear more about opportunities.

Elena Chatziathanasiadou waving

Recruiters Christina Hendrickson and Elena Chatziathanasiadou (waving) make themselves available for conversations after the lightning talks at OpenAI Girl Geek Dinner.  Erica Kawamoto Hsu / Girl Geek X

Christina Hendrickson: Thank you all again for coming. Thanks to Girl Geek X. We have Gretchen, Eric, and Erica here today. Thank you to our speakers: Brooke, Amanda, Lilian, Christine, Ashley, and thank you to Frances for helping us in organizing and to all of you for attending.

Ashley Pilipiszyn: Thank you, everybody.


Our mission-aligned Girl Geek X partners are hiring!

“Enterprise to Computer (a Star Trek Chatbot)”: Grishma Jena with IBM (Video + Transcript)

Speakers:
Grishma Jena / Cognitive Software Engineer / IBM
Sukrutha Bhadouria / CTO & Co-Founder / Girl Geek X

Transcript:

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Hi everyone, I hope you’ve been having a great day so far. Hi, Grishma. Hi, so yes, we are ready for our next talk. I’m Sukrutha and Grishma is here to give the next talk. Just before we get started, the same set of housekeeping rules. First is, we’re recording. We’re gonna share in a week. Please post your questions, not in chat, but in the Q and A. So you see the Q and A button at the bottom? Click on that and post there. If for some reason we run out of time, and we can’t get to your questions, we’ll have a record of it and it’s easy for us to find later and get you your answers later.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So please share on social media #GGXelevate and look for job postings on our website at girlgeek.io/opportunities. We’ve also been having, throughout the day, viewing parties at various companies. So shout-out to Zendesk, Strava, Guidewire, Climate, Grand Rounds, Netflix, Change.org, Blue Shield, Grio, and Salesforce Portland office.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: So now, on to Grishma. Grishma is a cognitive software engineer at IBM. She works on the data science for marketing team at IBM Watson. So today her talk is about Enterprise to Computer: a Star Trek chatbot. I’m sure there’s a lot of Star Trek fans out there because I know I am one, and I can’t wait to hear about your talk, Grishma.

Grishma Jena: Thank you, Sukrutha.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Go ahead and get started. You can share your slides.

Grishma Jena: Okay, I’m gonna minimize this. Alright, can you see my slides? Okay. Hi, everyone, I’m Grishma. As Sukrutha mentioned I work as a cognitive software engineer with IBM in San Francisco. So, a lot of my job duties involve dealing with a lot of data, trying to come up with proprietary data science or AI solutions for our Enterprise customers. My background is in machine learning and natural language processing which is why I’m talking on a chatbot today.

Grishma Jena: I’ve also recently joined this non-profit called For Her, where we’re trying deal with creating a chatbot that could act as a health center, as a resource center for people who are going through things like domestic abuse or sexual violence so I’m very interested to see you know, a totally different social application of chatbot. But for today we’ll focus on something fun. And before I begin, a very happy Women’s Day to all of you out there. So, yeah.

Grishma Jena: When was the last time you interacted with a chatbot? It could have been a few minutes before, when, you know, Akilah was talking and your Alexa probably got activated by mistake and you had to be like, “Alexa, stop.” It could be with Siri. We interact with Siri every day. It could be on a customer service chat or it could be on a customer service call.

Grishma Jena: Basically, there are so many different avenues and applications of chatbots today that sometimes it’s even hard to distinguish if are we talking to a human. Is it a chatbot in disguise of a human? And it’s quite interesting to see where chatbots have come in the past few years.

Grishma Jena: So, this was a grad school project that we did. Our idea was, okay, chatbots are amazing. We really like that they help take some of the workload off humans, but how can we make them seem a little more human, a little less mechanical? Could we give them some sort of a fun personality?

Grishma Jena: And we brainstormed for a bit and we finally came up with the idea, hey, why don’t we, I mean … Well, to be honest we weren’t that big fans of Star Trek, but we did become one during the course of this project and we were like, “Okay, let’s think of Star Trek”. It has a wide fan base and let’s try to not pick one single character from Star Trek but let’s take all of the characters and make this huge mix of references and trademark dialogues and see what kind of personality the chatbot would have.

Grishma Jena: So, like I mentioned, the motivation was to make a chatbot a little more human-like. And we wanted to have a more engaging user experience. So the application of this could be, it doesn’t have to be something related to, you know, like an entertainment industry. It could be also something like a sports lover bot so that would be very chatty and extroverted and it would support your favorite sports team. Or it could be something a little more sober like a counselor bot who is very understanding and supportive and listens to you venting out or asks you about how your day was. So yeah, we chose Star Trek infused personality.

Grishma Jena: So our objective with Star Trek was wanted it to incorporate references from the show. [inaudible 00:05:17] wanted to [inaudible 00:05:20] Spock and live long and prosper. We wanted it to be data driven model, we did not want to feed in dialogues we wanted it to just feed in a corpus and have it generate dialogues on its own. We obviously wanted it to give interesting responses and to have the user engaged because that is one of the things that a chatbot should do, right? So in really simple words, just think of a friend of yours or it could be yourself who is this, you know, absolutely big fan of Star Trek and just transfer that personality to a chatbot.

Grishma Jena: So this is what the schema of our bot look like. We had the user utterance which is basically anything that you say or that you provide as input to the chatbot. And then we had a binary classifier. I’ll delve deeper into why exactly we wanted it, but the main point is that we wanted it to be able to distinguish whether what you’re saying to the chatbot is it something related to Star Trek or is it something a little more general conversation like, “How are you feeling today?” Or “What is the weather like?” And depending on that we had on that we had two different routes which the bot would take to generate a response.

Grishma Jena: So before we begin, we obviously need some sort of data and we decided that we would take all of the data that was available for the different Star Trek movies and the TV series. You’d be surprised at how little data is available, actually. We initially thought of just doing a Spock bot, but Spock himself has very limited dialogues so we just expanded our search to the entire Star Trek universe. And that’s why we took dialogues from movies, TV series. We didn’t want to have any sort of limitations as far as the data was concerned. We ended up with about a little over 100,000 pairs of dialogues.

Grishma Jena: Then we also went and got this database, which is known as the Cornell Movie Database. This database was created by Cornell University, which has a collection of raw movie scripts. It’s just a really good data set to train your bot on, the way how humans interact and what kind of topics they talk about, what are the responses like.

Grishma Jena: And finally, we also had a Twitter data set because we wanted some topics that were related to the ongoing affairs in the world, the current news topics. Because we envisioned that if you had a chatbot then people do like to talk to the chatbot or ask for the chatbot’s opinion on something that’s happening in real time.

Grishma Jena: So the very first component of a chatbot was having a binary classifier. Like I mentioned, we had two different routes for our chatbot. One would be the Star Trek route and the other would be a general conversation route. So we had the binary classifier that would help us distinguish whether whatever the user is uttering or whatever the user is giving as an input is it related to Star Trek or is it general conversation which was getting handled by the Cornell Movie Database. So we used an 80:20, that is the training data set and the testing data set split. And the features that we used were we took the top 10,000 TF-IDF unigrams and bigrams.

Grishma Jena: TF-IDF stands for tone frequency and inwards document frequency. Tone frequency is nothing but how many times a given word occurs in your corpus and inverse document frequency,, it’s kind of a weight that is attached to a word. So think of a textbook or think of a document that you have. Words like prepositions, like the, of, and would occur multiple times. But really words that would be important that would have some sort of conceptual representation, perhaps like the topic of it. Compared to it would be a little rare in occurrence, compared to prepositions, compared to commonly used words, and that’s why they should be given more weightage. So that’s the whole idea behind TF-IDF.

Grishma Jena: Unigrams and bigrams are nothing but you divide the entire document that you have into words. An unigram would be one [bit kilo word inaudible 00:09:17] bigram would be a set of two consecutive words that occur in the document. There’s an example later on in the slide to explain it better. Stop words, when consider stop words are just filler words like I mentioned similar to the prepositions. And we were very happy with the performance of the binary classifier. We were able to get a 95% accuracy on the test set, and we decided that is good enough, let’s move on to the next one.

Grishma Jena: And finally, this is the main core of it, where deep learning comes into play. So with deep learning, we used a model called a Seq2seq which is a particular type of recurrent neural network. So if you can see the image on the right, it is a simplified version of a neural network where you give it an input and it gets an output and that output is also the input for the next cycle, so it’s kind of like a feedback looping mechanism.

Grishma Jena: First, the specific type of neural network that we use, Seq2seq. It was just two recurrent neural networks so just think of a really big component that has two smaller components, which is an encoder and a decoder.

Grishma Jena: So the encoder actually takes in the input from the user and tries to provide some sort of context. What do the words mean? What exactly is the semantics behind the sentence that the user has given? And the decoder generates the output based on the context that it has understood and also based on the previous inputs that were given to it, which is where the feedback mechanism comes into play.

Grishma Jena: So just to go a little deeper into it. This is a representation of what a Seq2seq with encoder and decoder would look like. So the input over here would be, “Are you free tomorrow?” and the encoder takes in that input and tries to understand what exactly is the context or the meaning of this sentence. And finally the decoders understands, okay, this is something someone is asking about either they want to take an appointment or someone’s availability or someone’s schedule. And that’s where the reply is something like, “Yes, I am. What’s up?”

Grishma Jena: So these are some statistics about how exactly we went on training this on AWS. We used a p2.xlarge instance with one Nvidia Accelerator GPU and then we had the Star Trek Seq2seq. So we had one Seq2seq for just Star Trek dialogues and we had another one, the Cornell Seq2seq which is on Cornell data, which is more for just a general conversation purpose.

Grishma Jena: So we went ahead, we generated some sentences, but then we realized that the ones for Star Trek were really good because you’re giving it Star Trek as input so obviously the output is also going to be Star-trekky. But for the general conversation ones, for things like, “What is the weather like?”, “How are you doing today?”, “What is the time?” it was a little difficult for us because obviously the input is not Star Trek related, right? So the output also wouldn’t be Star Trek related, but we wanted this to be a Star Trek chatbot.

Grishma Jena: So we brainstormed a bit and we thought, “Hey, why don’t we try something called a style shifting?” Which is basically like you take a normal sentence, a sentence from the general conversation, and you try to shift it into the Star Trek domain.

Grishma Jena: And the way we did this was, we went through the entire corpus, the data set for Star Trek, and we created a word graph out of it. A word graph would be, just think of it as you pass different sentences in the data set and each of the words would form a node and the edges between them would tell how they occurred in relation to one another. So if they occurred right next to each other or within the same sentence.

Grishma Jena: And along with the words in the node we also had a part of speech tag. So we indicated whether it was an adjective, or a noun, or a pronoun or a conjunction. So let’s say for example our sentence was, “Live long and prosper.” You break it down into four words which are the four different nodes and then we label them with a different part of speech tag and we connected them because they come one after the other in the sentence.

Grishma Jena: So what we did, was after we built out this really huge word graph, we looked it up to insert what could be appropriate words between two given words in the input. So once we had the sentence we would check for every two words in the sentence and see what are the words that we could insert in between to give it more of a Star Trek feel to it to just, you know, shift the domain into Star Trek.

Grishma Jena: We went ahead and we did that and these were the kind of results that we got. “I am sorry” was the input and then the word graph went ahead and inputted “Miranda” at the end. “I will go” and then it inputted “back” at the end of the sentence because “go” and “back” kind of occur very commonly with each other. And similarly for the start of the sentences, it tried to input names like “Uhura” or “Captain”. So one thing we noticed was it really good at inputting names at the start and the end of the sentence and using the character names from the show did end up giving it a slightly more Star Trek feel than before.

Grishma Jena: So we went ahead and we just randomly tried to insert words that occurred more frequently between two words but then we realized that some of the sentences were ungrammatical. So what do we do? We came up with this idea of let us use the word graph as it is and then let’s take some sort of a filter to our responses. So, like I said, we realized that the word graph was giving a few incoherent and incorrect responses. What we did was we went ahead and constructed an n-gram model.

Grishma Jena: So n over here would be unigram, bigram, trigram. You can see the example over here if n is equal to one, which is an unigram, you break down the sentence into just different words so “this” would be one unigram “is” would be another unigram. If n is two, which a bigram, you would take two words that co-occur together. So in this case the first bigram would be “This is,” second one would be “is a” and then similar for trigram it would be “This is a” and then “is a sentence”.

Grishma Jena: So we created an n-gram model which was just to understand what exactly is the kind of dataset that Star Trek has. And then finally we wanted to get a probability distribution over the sequence of words that we have had.

Grishma Jena: So once we get this, we start to filter the responses and we ran the sentences using the bigram models that we trained on the Star Trek data set. Because of this we kind of got a reference type for seeing that what structures are grammatically correct. We went ahead and we get them and the ones that were a little odd sounding or that didn’t really occur anywhere in the data set we went ahead and removed them.

Grishma Jena: Another metric that we used for this was perplexity. So just think of perplexity as some sort of an explainability metric. We went ahead and used that which would help us tell how well a probability distribution was able to predict it.

Grishma Jena: Finally, we have all of the things in place and we have to evaluate the performance of the chatbot. So we came up with two categories of evaluation metrics. The first one was quantitative metrics where we used perplexity, which was mentioned on the first slide. And the second one was we wanted to see often was it using words that were very particular to Star Trek that you don’t really use in normal day life, you know, like maybe spaceship or engage.

Grishma Jena: And the second category was human evaluations where we got a bunch of, user group and we asked them to just read the input and the output and see how good it was in terms of grammar. If the response actually made sense, if it was appropriate. And finally, on the Star Trek style. Just how Star-trekky did it sound?

Grishma Jena: And, we also came across another bot online which is called as a Fake Spock Pandora Bot which was contrary to the way we had. Our bot was data driven this was rule based so it was actually given an input of human generated responses.

Grishma Jena: We wanted to see how good would a data driven model perform as compared to a human generated one. So this is just what the Fake Spock Pandora Bot looked like. And these were the kind of responses that the Pandora Bot gave. If you said, “I’m hungry, Captain” it said, “What will you be eating?” So it’s giving really good appropriate responses because humans were the back end for this.

Grishma Jena: And then, what we did was we went ahead and evaluated the results. And we saw that our bot was performing better for Star Trek style and it also was a little more coherent. For grammar, Pandora Bot was much better and that’s not surprising because humans were the ones who actually wrote it out. For perplexity, the Star Trek perplexity started dialogues were 65, so that was our baseline number and we figured out that the kind of responses our bot was generating that are 60, 60.9 was a little closer compared to Pandora was like, way far off at 45.

Grishma Jena: So we were pretty happy with our performance. I’m just gonna give you a few examples of what the different bots generated. So the yellow ones are the Pandora Bot and the blue ones are the E2Cbot. So let’s see, if the user says, “Beam me up, Scotty” the yellow one, that is the Fake Pandora Bot, gives, “I don’t have a teleportation device” which is a good answer. And the blue one is, “Aye, Sir” which is also a good answer. A little curt, but nothing wrong with it.

Grishma Jena: In the second example if you see our bot answered, “Bones, I like you.” So the “Bones” part is actually come from the word graph which gives it a little more of a Star Trek feel. And the last one over here is the Fake Bot, the human generated one, just says, “I am just an AI chatting on the internet” which is kind of not the response that you are looking for.

Grishma Jena: A few more examples over here. The user says, “My name is Alex” and then the Fake Spock Bot says, “Yes, I know Christine.” I just told you my name was Alex, why would you call me Christine? But our bot says, “What do you want me to do, Doctor?”, which is a better response. And, yeah, these are the kind of responses.

Grishma Jena: I think some of our human focus group people said that they might be correct, appropriate responses, but they might not be factually correct, which was a challenge for us, as well as for the Fake Spock Bot. We didn’t really delve deeper into it because that would kind of dive more into having a question answering system and trying to check if it’s factually correct or not but we tried to make our focus group users understand that it’s just a bot at the end of the day.

Grishma Jena: So finally, we were able to generate Star Trek style text. We were very happy with that, we were able to use the data driven approach which meant we could automate it. And we did figure that it performed better than the human generated responses that Pandora Bot would give, at least on style and at least on the appropriateness. It still needs a little bit of improvement in grammar but we were pretty happy with it.

Grishma Jena: So that’s me. Live long and prosper. And feel free to reach out to me on Linkedin or on Twitter if you have any questions about this. Thank you.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Thank you, Grishma. This was great. So just to close I just wanted to mention to everybody that you actually sent your speaker submission to us and that’s how we got connected. So thank you for doing that. We got a lot of comments from people who are Star Trek fans, but yeah, what inspired you to build this project?

Grishma Jena: Yes, so this was actually a grad school project. We were taking a deep learning course so all of us had to build a chatbot as an Alexa skill. We brainstormed a lot, and we actually thought that Spock because Star Trek has a really huge fan base so Spock would be a good idea to do. But Spock had very little dialogue in all of the movies and the television series and then we were like, “You know what, let’s not stick to just one character, let’s have the entire Star Trek universe.” And, the bonus was that during my semester, I could continuously binge watch Star Trek and say that, “Yeah, I’m doing research because I want to see how well my chatbot works,” but I was just binge watching to be honest.

Sukrutha Bhadouria: Nice. That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much, Grishma, for your time. We really appreciate it and for your enthusiasm in signing up through our speaker submissions.

Grishma Jena: Thank you so much, Sukrutha.