Abstract: 

Not even a decade ago, machine learning was a profession for an elite few. Nowadays, we don't have to be math or engineering wizards to implement state-of-the-art predictive models. Advances in computing hardware, especially utilizing GPUs for deep neural network training, make it feasible to develop predictive models that achieve human-level performance in various natural language processing and image recognition challenges. The manifold software layers and APIs allowing us to utilize these hardware resources are becoming ever so convenient. In this talk, I will highlight recent research and technology advances and trends of the last year(s) concerning GPU-accelerated machine learning and deep learning and focusing on the most profound hardware and software paradigms that have enabled it.

Bio: 

Sebastian Raschka is a machine learning researcher developing new deep learning architectures to solve problems in the field of biometrics with a focus on face recognition and privacy protection. Among others, his research activities include applications of machine learning to solve problems in (computational) biology. After receiving his doctorate from Michigan State University, Sebastian recently joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison as Assistant Professor of Statistics. Sebastian Raschka is also the author of the bestselling book “Python Machine Learning", which received the ACM Best of Computing award in 2016 and was translated into many different languages, including German, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Polish, and Italian. In his free time, Sebastian loves to contribute to open source projects, and methods that he implemented are now successfully used in machine learning competitions such as Kaggle.