Abstract: 

Machine learning methods and software are becoming widely deployed. But how are we sharing expertise about bottlenecks and pain points in deploying solutions? In terms of the practice of data science, we seem to be at a similar point today as software engineering was in the early 1980s. Best practice is not widely understood or deployed. In this talk we will focus on two particular
components of data science solutions: the preparation of data and the deployment of machine learning systems.

Bio: 

Neil Lawrence leads Amazon Research Cambridge where he is a Director of Machine Learning. He is on leave of absence from the University of Sheffield where he is a Professor in Computational Biology and Machine Learning in the Department of Computer Science.

He received his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southampton in 1994. Following a period as an field engineer on oil rigs in the North Sea he returned to academia to complete his PhD in 2000 at the Computer Lab in Cambridge University. He spent a year at Microsoft Research in Cambridge before leaving to take up a Lectureship at the University of Sheffield, where he was subsequently appointed Senior Lecturer in 2005. In January 2007 he took up a post as a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science in the University of Manchester where he worked in the Machine Learning and Optimisation research group. In August 2010 he returned to Sheffield to take up a collaborative Chair in Neuroscience and Computer Science.

Neil’s main research interest is machine learning through probabilistic models. He focuses on both the algorithmic side of these models and their application. He has a particular focus on applications in personalized health and computational biology, but happily dabbles in other areas such as speech, vision and graphics.

Neil was Associate Editor in Chief for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (from 2011-2013) and is an Action Editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research. He was the founding editor of the Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (2006) and is currently series editor. He was an area chair for the NIPS conference in 2005, 2006, 2012 and 2013, Workshops Chair in 2010 and Tutorials Chair in 2013. He was General Chair of AISTATS in 2010 and AISTATS Programme Chair in 2012. He was Program Chair of NIPS in 2014 and was General Chair for 2015. He is one of the founders of the DALI Meeting and Data Science Africa.