Sessions at PAPIs '15 on Friday 7th August

I will examine predictive technologies in the light of the history of technology and its prediction. No matter how shiny and new, a new technology is still a technology, and there are general patterns that seem to recur. We can learn from those patterns if we pay attention to them.

In particular I will look at the challenge of predicting the impact of new technologies, talk about how they evolve, and the role that modularity, standards and interoperability play in their evolution.

I will talk more specifically about some of the particular challenges of making APIs and interfaces for predictive technologies such as machine learning, and speculate on the prospects for making machine learning a service, and more of a mature engineering discipline. In passing I will briefly demonstrate some recent machine learning work from NICTA.

This presentation will focus on anomaly detection for network data streams where the aim is to predict a distribution of future values and flag unlikely situations. Challenges both in terms of data science and engineering will be discussed, such as the accuracy, robustness and scalability of the prediction API. An example of a production deployment will also be discussed.

After operating for three years as a “black box” predictive API, Seldon recently open-sourced it’s entire predictive stack. Alex will talk about Seldon’s journey from closed to open: the challenges and pitfalls, architectural considerations, case studies, changes to business models, and new opportunities for partnership across the full stack - between both open and closed technology providers.

[Sponsored presentation]

Build a better, faster, more efficient predictive API with the Actor model of programming. Latency, logging, full utilization are all easily handled with this framework. Upwork (formerly Elance-oDesk) freelancer availability model — anticipating who's looking for work right now — is now a real-time service, without costly or complicated build-out of our stack or our datacenter, thanks to the Actor model.

In this talk, we describe AzureML: a web service enabling software developers and data scientists to build predictive applications. AzureML provides several unique features. These include (a) Collaboration (b) Versioning (c) Graphical authoring(d) Push button operationalization and (e) Monetization. We outline the design principles, system design and lessons learned in building such a system.

Diversity in machine learning APIs works against realising machine learning's full potential by making it difficult to compose multiple algorithms. This paper introduces the Protocols and Structures for Inference (PSI) service architecture and specification for presenting learning algorithms and data as RESTful web resources that are accessible via a common but flexible and extensible interface. This is joint work with Dr. Mark Reid of the Australian National University and NICTA and Dr. Barry Drake of Canon Information Systems Research Australia.

[Sponsored presentation] In the past year, Machine Learning has been getting attention as a necessary tool for doing something useful with the ever growing volume of data. This misleads some to believe that Machine Learning is new, but the truth is that the core algorithms and concepts have been around for a long time. What is new though is the confluence of Machine Learning and Cloud Computing which for the first time in history is making learning from large data possible thru the use of programmable APIs.

Since 2011, BigML has worked to implement this vision of a programmable web powered by a seamless machine learning layer in the cloud which will enable future smart apps to adapt themselves to a changing context in real-time as new information arrives. In this presentation we will trace the history of Machine Learning from it’s origins to the present and discuss the future evolution that must occur in terms of simplicity, programmability, importability / exportability, compostability, specialization and standardization in order for it to make an impact in the “real world” and make this vision come alive.