Analytics India Magazine has just concluded its day one of its inaugural virtual conference Plugin. Organised by AIM in collaboration with ADaSci, Altair, AnalytticaDatalab, SAS and Kyvos Insights, this 2-day online conference connects developers & leaders in the data science & machine learning space from across the world and offers and experience that is rich in knowledge and on par with in-person events.
Here are a few highlights from the action packed day one of Plugin:
A Crash Course On NLP By Dipanjan Sarkar
The day has kicked off with the workshop by Dipanjan Sarkar, a lead data scientist at Applied Materials and a very well known mentor in the ML community. In this handson workshop that lasted close to three hours, Dipanjan covered a wide range of topics with regards to NLP. From using popular libraries like spacy to applying the state of the art model BERT for text classification, Dipanjan introduced the audience to all things NLP. The session was followed by a Q&As from the audience, which were eloquently addressed by the speaker.
Future of Smart Analytics by Anish of Altair
Anish explains how to leverage a decision tree to draw more insights using Altair’s Knowledge Studio. Data scientists and business analysts use Altair to generate actionable insight from their data. Knowledge Studio is a market-leading easy to use machine learning and predictive analytics solution that rapidly visualizes data as it quickly generates explainable results – without requiring a single line of code.
A recognized analytics leader, Altair enables data analytics teams to deploy predictive models with speed and efficiency. Easy to use, Knowledge Studio includes prebuilt data preparation and data science functions, and integrates with common programming languages. This means many people across the business can realize the value of powerful analytics using Knowledge Studio.
Related to Knowledge Studio, Altair Knowledge Seeker is for analytic teams who wish to augment existing analytic solutions with powerful data segmentation and profiling capabilities, or who wish to explore insights using Altair’s market-leading patented decision trees.
Large datasets with billions of rows and thousands of columns can be very difficult to work with and analyze. Knowledge Studio for Apache Spark is designed to overcome big data challenges without having to depend on complicated scripts.
How To Build Productive Businesses Using Kyvos Tools
Ajay Anand, Chief Product Officer at Kyvos Insights, in his talk, elaborated about how the users(BI developers)can leverage Kyvos to build future-proof architecture for growing data and BI needs. He has also explained the importance of creating a single source of truth across different businesses. Kyvos’ Smart OLAP technology allows businesses to become more productive with interactive and self-service business intelligence at enterprise scale at a fraction of the cost of their traditional architecture.
Decisions You Can Trust By Deepak Ramanathan of SAS
Deepak is Vice President, Global Customer Advisory at SAS. In his role, Deepak advises organizations who are investing in AI and machine learning projects.
Deepak discussed the manual model development and explained the life cycle of the Operationalising Analytics and how it revolves round data preparing, exploring, modelling, registering,deploying, monitoring and retraining.
In this talk, Deepak emphasised on the need of business sponsors and IT leaders to operationalize the exploratory projects into recurring business value. However, he reminded the audience that the path to derive value out of data is not straightforward and has briefed the listeners on the pitfalls of mismanagement of analytics, the common challenges in the journey from AI pet projects to AI profit generating products and the metrics that matter.
Risk Mitigation with Explainable AI By Analyttica Datalab
Speakers Madhav Kaushik, VP and Laskhmi, AVP of Analyttica Datalab introduced the audience to the very happening topic in the ML community— explainability. Explainable AI is touted to shed the black box reputation of ML models and in this talk, the Madhav and Lakshmi give a hands on tutorial on how imbibing explainable AI can result in increased adoption of AI in the organisations and how this will lead to solving problems better. To explain this notion, the speakers took one of the sample cases on credit risk modelling from their LEAPS portal. They provided a step-by-step approach on how to learn and understand the different stages and techniques used in data exploration, data treatment and feature selection, as part of a model building exercise, as part of a risk framework.
Accelerating Model Building and Decisions at Scale With SAS Tools
SAS have been riding the high tide of ML democratisation by developing tools that enable both amateurs and professionals to draw insights from data with just few drag and drop operations.
SAS Viya, is one such product that can be leveraged by the organisations to build data driven solutions at scale. In this talk, Saptarishi Duuta and Nikhil Suthar of SAS bring to fore the many innovations of SAS in their two hour long workshop.
In the first half of the workshop, the speakers gave a glimpse of how businesses can utilize a self-service environment for data discovery, exploration, and build complex machine learning models that help organizations to gain competitive advantage, significantly increase their productivity and adapt to dynamic business demands.
With the help of a demo, they have showcased how a data scientist can build dozens or even hundreds of models simultaneously, and tune each one to perfection while accessing all models to select champion and top challenger models for effective model tracking.
In the second track, the speakers demonstrated how various components of the SAS Platform help in making personalized decisions in real-time and at scale, thus empowering enterprises in their digital transformation initiatives by making effective decisions on time.
Data Architectures Are Looking In The Wrong Place By Bill Inmon
One of the last talks of the day was of Bill Inmon, the father of data warehousing. In this talk, Bill walked us through the evolution of text analytics and how he and his organisation have been leveraging data analytics to turn words into wealth. One of their solutions, Textual ETL has been used to find the customer loyalty with regards to airlines. The customer feedback was collected and the text is passed through Textual ETL. A standard database was then created to draw insights.
The day 1 of Plugin witnessed more than 25 sessions with talks from experts across the world. From explainable AI to computer vision to health analytics, the talks covered a wide range of topics and Day 2 will be no less spectacular with speakers like Abhishek Thakur and Viral Shah helming the virtual stage. We will be back with highlights from Day 2 tomorrow.
