The industry’s leading event for the developer community is back in January 2020. A year further into the machine learning ecosystem and MLDS 2020 returns with two packed, insightful editions in Bangalore (22-23 Jan) and Hyderabad (30-31 Jan). Last year’s inaugural summit held in January at NIMHANS Convention Centre saw the venue at full capacity with 700+ delegates and 300+ industry-leading companies like Microsoft, Intel, ABInBev, Amazon, Walmart, SAP Labs India Pvt Ltd, Capgemini, Cognizant, AXA XL, Flipkart, Philips Research, AWS, Capital One and Oracle Cloud Solution Hub, among others, participating in the summit to track the developments in this fast-paced machine learning space.

MLDS was specifically launched to fill the gap between machine learning applications and how it fits into AI value chain with industry leaders, IT Decision Makers and evangelists discussing the newest progress on ML, how companies are designing AI strategies for their value chains, strategies on acquiring data to train models and how the technology was scaled.

But more so, the conference addresses the unique needs of developer ecosystem by sharing insights and best practices on topics ranging from AI/ML innovations to reducing the model bias, open-source deep learning and how to drive the most out of your cloud environment.

Companies are experimenting with adopting AI/ML technologies across their value chains and as emerging technologies enter the enterprises — there is a greater thrust on developers and machine learning engineers to apply ML beyond support functions into core business processes. MLDS provides data scientists, ML engineers and practitioners an opportunity to interact with industry-leading platforms powering the most advanced ML capabilities to build the next generation of applications.

In more ways than one, MLDS has become a pivotal point for exponential learning, industry networking, interaction with tools like Azure AI solutions, AWS, Intel Developer tools and engage with the developer community and understand where the industry is heading.

Industry Thought Leaders Share Their Vision On AI & Machine Learning 

Learn about hard-earned lessons in ML: As tech companies and organisations outside the technology domain double down on AI/ML, we are beginning to see more enterprises setting up teams of machine learning engineers, modellers and data scientists. This is an excellent opportunity to understand fast-paced developments happening in this industry, learn about hard-earned lessons about ML and who knows, maybe land the next job from networking at MLDS.

Learn why transparency and accountability counts in machine learning: Looking ahead to 2020, there is a greater need to raise awareness on the importance of fairness in AI training systems, the impact of bias on models and the critical questions plaguing ML engineers ⁠— do they need to go beyond simply business metrics to factor in the goodness of AI. Organisations like Microsoft treat these issues seriously and ML practitioners can gain practical insights on how to address issues around bias, transparency and accountability and steps the model builders should take to avoid bias.

Enabling humans-in-the-loop to do more: The holy grail of machine learning and AI has been “democratisation” to enable humans-in-the-loop to put prototypes into production. This is an area where tech giants Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Intel lead the market. But the real enablers who can drive these machine learning tools forward are ML engineers, data scientists and practitioners — companies are building a suite of developer tools to accelerate time-to-market and reduce complexities in ML systems. At MLDS 2019, Intel demoed computer vision applications built with OpenVINO toolkit. Cloud environments like Azure and AWS augment the data scientists’ toolkit but providing tools to deploy prototypes into production.

Wrapping Up

The last summit addressed a wide variety of issues the ML community faces — for example the need for the best-tuned or best-performing model, why it is important not to lose track of critical business metrics and which are the best developer tools that make it easy to apply algorithms. From industry-leading statements around products to Technical Deep Dives with expert developers and startups changing the face of AI landscape, MLDS 2020 is a great platform for exchanging ideas and progress in this fast-evolving field.