Capital One DataLabs India hosted their 2nd Annual Machine Learning Summit

Capital One DataLabs India hosted their 2nd Annual Machine Learning Summit in Bangalore on 31st August 2017. The country's top academicians and practitioners gathered at the Summit to discuss cutting edge research and applications of Algorithms, Tools, and Platforms in the Machine Learning area.

The conference hosted top academicians from the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) Kolkata and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore. The chief guest of the event was the Director of the Indian Statistical Institute, Prof. Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay. She shared her perspectives on the future potential of Machine Learning and talked about a breakthrough technique of applying Genetic Algorithms to solve optimization problems faced by data scientists.

Prof. Partha Talukdar from the Department of Computing and Data Science at IISc talked about Goal Directed Knowledge Graphs. He said that knowledge harvesting from Web-scale text datasets has emerged as an important and active research area over the last decade resulting in the automatic construction of large knowledge bases (KBs) consisting of millions of entities and relationships among them. He explained how this has the potential to revolutionize Artificial Intelligence and intelligent decision making by removing the "knowledge bottleneck" which has plagued systems in these areas all along. Prof. Chiranjib Bhattacharya from IISc talked about a variety of techniques used in 'Information Retrieval' from data. There was a discussion on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques and algorithms by Prof. Utpal Garain from ISI and other researchers in the field. Jay Shah and Aashish Bansiwala from Capital One's DataLabs shared their perspectives on the use of cutting edge Machine Learning techniques to solve industrial scale problems in the Financial Services domain. Other discussions included the correlation of social behavior data with financial decisions, and recent research on natural language processing and computer vision.

The Summit also devoted time to understand how computational abilities and the data environment are evolving to keep pace with the advancement of the research in Machine Learning. Leading the discussion, Prof. Yogesh Simmhan from IISc shared his research on Scalable Data Platforms for Network and Stream Analytics. Capital One's Rajeev Tiwari shared his perspective on how leading companies are stepping up to revamp their data and computational environment by leveraging cloud computing.

The Summit concluded with a lively panel discussion where future applications of Machine Learning in a variety of areas were discussed.

Cognitive computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning constitute a rapidly evolving domain where the speed of change creates both opportunities and challenges for practitioners in this space, The discussions at the Capital One DataLabs Machine Learning Summit underscored the dynamic nature of this field, and it's incredible potential to transform the quality and pace of decision making through the use of data.