Machine Learning at Reasonable Scale

We believe that immature data pipelines are preventing a large portion of industry practitioners from leveraging the latest research on ML: truth is, outside of Big Tech and advanced startups, ML systems are still far from producing the promised ROI. The good news is that times are changing: thanks to a growing ecosystem of tools and shared best practices, even small teams can be incredibly productive at a “reasonable scale”. Based on our experience as founders and researchers, we present our philosophy for modern, no-nonsense data pipelines, highlighting the advantages of a "PaaS-like" approach.

Take-aways

1. data is the most important thing; 2. build your core feature, buy everything else; 3. a small team can be exceptionally productive at "reasonable scale", if the right tools are in place.

In this episode

Jacopo Tagliabue

Director of AI, Coveo

Educated in several acronyms across the globe (UNISR, SFI, MIT), Jacopo Tagliabue was co-founder and CTO of Tooso, an A.I. company in San Francisco acquired by Coveo in 2019. Jacopo is currently the Director of AI at Coveo, shipping models to hundreds of customers and millions of users. When not busy building products, he is exploring topics at the intersection of language, reasoning, and learning: his research and industry work is often featured in the general press and premier A.I. venues. In previous lives, he managed to get a Ph.D., do sciency things for a pro basketball team, and simulate a pre-Columbian civilization.

Twitter

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.

Vishnu Rachakonda

Host

Vishnu Rachakonda is the operations lead for the MLOps Community and co-hosts the MLOps Coffee Sessions podcast. He is a machine learning engineer at Tesseract Health, a 4Catalyzer company focused on retinal imaging. In this role, he builds machine learning models for clinical workflow augmentation and diagnostics in on-device and cloud use cases. Since studying bioengineering at Penn, Vishnu has been actively working in the fields of computational biomedicine and MLOps. In his spare time, Vishnu enjoys suspending all logic to watch Indian action movies, playing chess, and writing.