10 Types of Features your Location ML Model is Missing
Machine learning on geographic data is relatively under-studied in comparison to ML on other formats like images or graphs. But geographic data is prevalent across a wide variety of domains (although many practitioners may not think of it that way). Clearly, any dataset with `latitude` and `longitude` columns can be viewed as geographic data, but also any dataset with a `zipcode`, `city`, `address`, or `county` can be construed as geographic. Demographics, weather, foot traffic, points of interest, and topographic features can all be used to enrich a dataset with any of these types of keys. In this coffee session, Anne discusses ways to simplify the process of incorporating geographic or location data into the MLOps workflow, as well as interesting trends in the geographic ML research community that will ultimately make it easier for us to learn from geography just as we do with images or graphs today.
Take-aways
In this episode
Anne Cocos
Director of Data Science, Ask Iggy
Dr. Anne Cocos currently leads data science and machine learning at Ask Iggy, Inc., a venture-backed, seed round startup focused on location analytics. Her team builds tools that make it simple for data scientists to leverage location information in their models and analyses. Previously she was the Director and Head, NLP and Knowledge Graph at GlaxoSmithKline, where she built algorithms and infrastructure to enable GSK’s scientists to leverage all the world’s written biomedical knowledge for drug discovery. She also worked on applied natural language processing research at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Department of Biomedical Informatics. Anne completed her Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was supported by the Google Ph.D. Fellowship and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence Key Scientific Challenges award. Before shifting her career toward artificial intelligence, Anne spent several years as an end-user of early ML-powered technologies in the U.S. Navy and at HelloWallet. Her previous degrees are from the U.S. Naval Academy, Royal Holloway University of London, and Oxford University. She currently lives just outside Philadelphia with her husband and three boys.
Demetrios Brinkmann
Host
Demetrios is one of the main organizers of the MLOps community and currently resides in a small town outside Frankfurt, Germany. He is an avid traveller who taught English as a second language to see the world and learn about new cultures. Demetrios fell into the Machine Learning Operations world, and since, has interviewed the leading names around MLOps, Data Science, and ML. Since diving into the nitty-gritty of Machine Learning Operations he felt a strong calling to explore the ethical issues surrounding ML. When he is not conducting interviews you can find him making stone stacking with his daughter in the woods or playing the ukulele by the campfire.