Jasmeet Bhatia: Rising Star in Data & Analytics
AI Master Group
Jasmeet is the VP, Decision Science Analytics at Truist, and is also the current winner of the Rising Star in Data and Analytics award, at the CDAO Conference in Boston. This episode is an opportunity to look behind the curtain, getting a detailed view of the business and volunteer profile of a top award winner in our industry. Also, near the end of the episode, Jasmeet describes an approach for ensuring that an analytics team is viewed by their company as a profit center, not as a cost center.
info_outline
Michael Koved: The Economics of Generative AI
AI Master Group
Michael holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, and is a Senior Fellow at Wharton (Artificial Intelligence and Analysis for Business). He’s also the president of Advanced Analytics, which is a consultancy that he founded. In this episode, Michael describes various risks and opportunities associated with the growing adoption of AI tools. In particular, he describes a scenario where AI contributes to income disparity at the societal level by replacing significantly more low-skilled jobs than it creates, which is described in the Nobel-prize-winning work of Daron Acemoglu...
info_outline
Nachiket Mehta: Inside the Data Mesh at Wayfair
AI Master Group
Nachiket is the Global Head, Data & Analytics Engineering at Wayfair. In that role, he spearheaded the company’s global implementation of data mesh. In this episode, Nachiket describes the four pillars of data mesh, and in doing so, he shares a rare front-line view of client-side operations involving data governance, including rich detail about how data mesh is implemented within an enterprise-class organization, what a successful implementation of that strategy requires, cultural implications, impact on data lineage, build vs buy considerations, and how that approach to data transforms...
info_outline
Zach Elewitz: The Leak Stops Here
AI Master Group
Zach is the Senior Director, Head of AI, Data Science and Analytics at Fortune Brands, a portfolio of brands that includes names like Yale, Master Lock, SentrySafe, Moen faucets, House of Rohl and Therma‑Tru, among others. In this episode, Zach describes his journey from a PhD in Mathematics with an MBA, to the head of AI at Fortune Brands. One project he describes is a solution that detects residential water leaks and that automatically shuts off the water to protect the house. Another project involves sentiment analysis of customer reviews, implemented in a way that’s tailored to the...
info_outline
Pavel Iakubovskii: Kaggle Master at Hugging Face
AI Master Group
Pavel holds two gold medals, two silver medals and three bronze on Kaggle. He’s also the author of several well-known libraries, including one that has about 20,000 stars on GitHub. Currently, he's a member of the open source engineering team at Hugging Face. This episode covers Pavel's journey from growing up in a small town in Russia, to becoming a Kaggle competition master and computer vision engineer at Hugging Face. The conversation also covers many insights about Hugging Face itself, including Hugging Face Hub, Enterprise Hub, the Transformers library, the Diffusers library for...
info_outline
Max Mozgovoy: the End of Traditional UX Research?
AI Master Group
This episode features a conversation with Max Mozgovoy, co-founder of VoxDiscover, which plans to use Gen AI to interview customers for user experience (UX) research done by app developers, or for customer lifecycle research, to build customer journey maps or personas, or to identify which features to add or change for the next version of product or service. The underlying idea of VoxDiscover is to use an AI voice agent to capture customer feedback right in the app or on a website, automating the insight as well, thereby achieving a much lower cost as compared to external service...
info_outline
Marwa Kechaou: A Keen Eye for Computer Vision
AI Master Group
With a PhD in machine learning and a specialization in computer vision, Marwa has done deep learning projects across several industries and is currently at Alohi, a Switzerland-based startup with 4 million users of document solutions like Sign.Plus, Fax.Plus and Scan.Plus. In this episode, she describes her journey from formal studies to hands-on work in industry, to her present role as a primary engineer at Alohi. The conversation also touches on what it’s like to maintain a connection to a top university as a Research Fellow, while also working full-time at a startup. Marwa also discusses...
info_outline
Iqbal Hossain: The UofAZ Knowledge Map Story
AI Master Group
Iqbal holds a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering, with a specialization in computer algorithms and graph theory. He is currently the Research Data Science Director at the University of Arizona. Aside from his innovative achievement in creating a knowledge map for the university (kmap.arizona.edu), he has one of the most remarkable and inspiring stories you’ll ever hear about overcoming disadvantages. (He grew up in a rural part of Bangladesh and was in 11th grade before he ever saw electricity.) In this episode, Iqbal describes the brief he was working on when he created the University...
info_outline
Jeffrey Spyropoulos: Making Analytics Count at JCP
AI Master Group
Jeffrey is one of those rare people who knew exactly what he wanted to do from an early age: Use mathematics to solve business problems. After earning his Masters Degree in Statistics from the University of Chicago, he went on to do high-impact analytics work in banking, retail and telco, holding senior leadership positions at top companies like Sally Beauty, HSN, AT&T and Bloomin' Brands. Currently, he leads Digital Analytics at JCPenney. In this episode, Jeffrey shares a detailed and very insightful analysis of all the factors and trade-offs involved in making a build vs buy decision for...
info_outline
Tapan Khopkar: A ‘MasterClass’ in Marketing Mix
AI Master Group
Tapan is the Executive Director of Marketing Sciences at OMD. This episode is a very thorough compendium of marketing science principles and practices, as applied to decisions about paid media. Topics include: • Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) vs Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) vs experiments, including how to use each and for what purpose • KPIs: Incremental sales vs top-of-funnel metrics like awareness and consideration • How to design incremental changes in the direction that a model is pointing • Testing a new marketing mix in various...
info_outlineWith a PhD in machine learning and a specialization in computer vision, Marwa has done deep learning projects across several industries and is currently at Alohi, a Switzerland-based startup with 4 million users of document solutions like Sign.Plus, Fax.Plus and Scan.Plus. In this episode, she describes her journey from formal studies to hands-on work in industry, to her present role as a primary engineer at Alohi. The conversation also touches on what it’s like to maintain a connection to a top university as a Research Fellow, while also working full-time at a startup. Marwa also discusses the challenge of staying current on new developments, because many papers have only marginal value, which makes it hard to quickly identify the important ones. The conversation concludes with a discussion about emerging technologies that Marwa considers to be quite promising in her field, especially diffusion models and LLM foundational vision models.