Everybody talks about AI these days, but how many of the solutions mentioned genuinely involve learning? Sure, there are plenty of results being published about DeepMind beating Starcraft - and most Atari games have been mastered by reinforcement learning algos a while ago - but what about actual business applications? In this online Data & Drinks event, Kaggle Grandmaster Konrad will give an overview of how you can apply associative reinforcement learning to a real-world problem: online content personalization (and stay within budget, because of open source).
About our guest
Konrad holds a PhD in statistics from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. During his period in academia, he focused on problems of extreme dependency modeling in credit risk. Besides research activities, Konrad was a tutor and supervised master students. Starting from classical statistics, he slowly moved towards data mining and Machine Learning.
After his PhD, Konrad worked in a variety of financial institutions on a wide array of quantitative data analysis problems. In the process, he became an expert on the entire lifetime of a data product cycle: from translating business requirements through data acquisition, wrangling, modeling, and testing, all the way to presenting the results to people allergic to mathematical terminology. He has visited different ends of the frequency spectrum in finance (from high-frequency trading to credit risk, and everything in between), predicted potato prices, and analyzed anomalies in the performance of large-scale industrial equipment.
As a person who himself stood on the shoulders of giants, Konrad believes in sharing the knowledge with others: it is very important to know how to approach practical problems with data science methods, but also how not to do it. He seems to be addicted to data analysis, so in his spare time, he competes on Kaggle.