Conference Talks

The Past, Present and the Future of Machine Learning for Tabular Data - Bojan Tunguz

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk, you will learn about the history and future directions of machine learning for Tabular Data. The talk covers • What is Tabular Data? • The Main Issues with Tabular Data • Deep Learning vs. Gradient Boosted Trees • Research Directions • GPU Acceleration Bojan Tunguz, PhD is a Quadruple Kaggle Grandmaster and a Senior Software Systems Engineer at NVIDIA ✅ Connect with Bojan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tunguz/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Real Time ML: Challenges and Solutions - Chip Huyen

Aug 28, 2025

Fresh data beats stale data for machine learning applications. This talk discusses the value of fresh data as well as different types of architecture and challenges of online prediction. Chip Huyen is a co-founder of Claypot AI, a platform for real-time machine learning. Previously, she was with Snorkel AI and NVIDIA. She teaches CS 329S: Machine Learning Systems Design at Stanford. She’s the author of the book Designing Machine Learning Systems, an Amazon bestseller in AI. ✅ Connect with Chip: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiphuyen/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Solving Grand Challenges in Math and Science through AI and Open Science - Joseph Spisak

Aug 28, 2025

We are now on the verge of an inflection point in the sciences as AI has the potential to greatly accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. From new computing platforms, achieving sustainability goals and reversing climate change to developing fundamentally new materials through AI guided approaches, we are now at the point in time where the impact will be felt by the breakthroughs we achieve. This talk illustrated really the tip of the ice berg of how the disruption of AI will be felt and areas such as experimental physics, neuroscience, biology, economics, astronomy, and chemistry, will all be disrupted as we continue to make progress in this space. Joseph Spisak is currently a product director in Meta AI’s research org FAIR where he founded multiple teams including a team focused on large model scaling and another on ambitious research in Math & Science including chemistry, synthetic biology, and human-machine interfaces. He has more than a decade of experience building platforms and tools used by a global community of AI innovators building the cutting edge of AI, including PyTorch and ONNX. Working for companies such as Meta/Facebook, Amazon, and Intel, Joseph is a Product Leader sitting at the intersection of ML, AI products, Open Source, Community Building, and Partnerships. Joseph is also an Executive in Residence at Canvas Ventures and he formally and informally advises a number of AI startups. ✅ Connect with Joseph: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jspisak/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Large Language Models and The Imitation Game - Mike Tamir

Aug 28, 2025

Mike’s talk goes deep into the question about whether or not the hype of large language models is real and what is the underlying intelligence behind these models. He explores how large language models hold up in the Turing Test to see its ability to mimic what humans would do. Other investigative mechanisms include the Octopus Test and other models such as CLIP: Contrastive Language Image Pre-training and Diffusion models play into the future of Large Language Models Mike Tamir is the Head of Machine Learning and AI at SIG ✅ Connect with Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miketamir/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Vector Databases and the Future of AI-powered Search - Sam Partee

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk you will learn about how vector based search works at scale with the open-soure database REDIS. In nine lines of code you can leverage open source NLP models to encode your unstructured data and make it ready for search. Sam is a Principal Applied AI Engineer at REDIS ✅ Connect with Sam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-partee-b04a1710a/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Solving Data Challenges with Knowledge Graphs and Context-Aware Recommendation Systems

Aug 28, 2025

Recommendation systems have advanced in recent years, but organizations still grapple with heterogeneous, sparse or insufficient data. These issues can cause bottlenecks for generating highly-personalized recommendations. In this talk we will discuss how to solve some of these challenges by building context-aware recommendation systems with knowledge graphs and graph data science. Katie is a Data Science Solution Architect at Neo4j. She completed her degree in Cognitive Neuroscience at Harvard University. Passionate about people and problem solving, she transitioned to focusing on helping people and businesses leverage data for impactful outcomes as a customer-facing data scientist. ✅ Connect with Katie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kbporter/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Reinforcing the Learning: How RL is paving the next great wave of Data Science - Laura Edell

Aug 28, 2025

Laura’s talk focuses on how Reinforcement learning is being applied to gaming, finance, manufacturing, inventory management, robot navigation and recommender systems. Reinforcement learning can overcome the challenges of stale or outdated data for different scenarios. There are many practical examples that are showcased that would benefit different production-level applications. Laura Edell is a Chief Data Scientist at Microsoft ✅ Connect with Laura: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauraerinedell/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Simplicity - A better path for machine learning - Joel Grus

Aug 28, 2025

Joel’s talk goes into different approaches of finding solution in machine learning. Is it better to have a simple solution or a complex solution. The talk centers around the complexities in natural language processing (NLP) modeling criteria and solution design choices. The overall message is to seek to find simplicity in your machine learning solutions by abstracting away your complexities. Joel Grus is currently a Vice President of Data Science and Engineering at Goldman Sachs. ✅ Connect with Joel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelgrus/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Machine Learning 2.0 with Hugging Face Transformers - Julien Simon

Aug 28, 2025

According to the latest State of AI report, "transformers have emerged as a general-purpose architecture for ML. Not just for Natural Language Processing, but also Speech, Computer Vision or even protein structure prediction." Indeed, the Transformer architecture has proven very efficient on a wide variety of Machine Learning tasks. But how can we keep up with the frantic pace of innovation? Do we really need expert skills to leverage these state-of-the-art models? Or is there a shorter path to creating business value in less time? In this code-level talk, we'll gradually build and deploy a Machine Learning application based on Transformers models. Along the way, you'll learn about the portfolio of open source and commercial Hugging Face solutions, how they can help you become hyper-productive in order to deliver high-quality Machine Learning solutions faster than ever before. Julien is currently Chief Evangelist at Hugging Face. He's recently spent 6 years at Amazon Web Services where he was the Global Technical Evangelist for AI & Machine Learning. Prior to joining AWS, Julien served for 10 years as CTO/VP Engineering in large-scale startups. ✅ Connect with Julien: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliensimon/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Mailchimp is like having your own AI Marketing Team - Stephane Pinel

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk, you will learn how to fully leverage Mailchimp’s machine-learning capability to scale your marketing efforts without having lots of staff. By enabling multiple use cases of machine learning for better audience targeting and management, Mailchimp users are able to serve their audiences more efficiently. See what machine learning is being used under the hood. Stephane Pinel is a Senior Director of Data Science at Mailchimp ✅ Connect with Stephane: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spinel/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Machine Learning for Search at Instacart - Tejaswi Tenneti

Aug 28, 2025

Instacart is the leader for online food delivery in the US and Canada and they deliver great search and recommendations at scale. You will learn about how they deliver great search results with machine learning through query understanding, retrieval and ranking. Tejaswi Tenneti is the Director of Machine Learning at Instacart ✅ Connect with Tejaswi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tejaswi-tenneti-78a66116/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Building Hendrix: Spotify's Machine Learning Platform - Micheal Seid

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk, you will learn about the evolution of machine learning at Spotify and how the platform team deploys machine learning at scale. The Spotify team has released many open source projects in the data space and actively contributes back to the open source community. Michael Seid is the Product Area Tech Lead - Machine Learning Platform at Spotify ✅ Connect with Michael: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbseid/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Effective Tools for ML Teams - Karan Nisar

Aug 28, 2025

What does it take to get the best model into production? We've seen industry-leading ML teams follow some of the same common workflows for dataset management, experimentation, and model management. I'll share case studies from customers across industries, outline best practices, and dive into tools and solutions for common pain points. Karan Nisar is the ML Engineer at Weights & Biases ✅ Connect with Karan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karannisar/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Machine Learning in Marketplaces - Ashim Datta

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk Ashim covers various interesting learnings from applying machine learning to solve problems in different online marketplaces. The talk can be summarized into the following points: Marketplaces have existed for centuries in the physical world. Online marketplaces have unique opportunities to apply machine learning. It is useful to understand who (in our marketplace) we are trying to serve using ML. Applying ML is not always easy, but there are ways to get around them Surveys can help in collecting information that is not directly available from interaction data on the marketplace. Complex content forms (such as videos) can be reduced to simpler forms such as image/text to develop temporal understanding required to find similar content Upwork’s work marketplace has amazing opportunities to apply machine learning Principles of recommender systems tried and tested in ecommerce and content platforms can help generate economic opportunities across the world Ashim Datta is a Director of Engineering for Machine Learning at Upwork, world's largest work marketplace. He did his engineering from VIT University in India and did his masters in statistics and management from The Wharton School. Ashim's professional career covers some long term stints at Meta and Pinterest and he is an angel investor at various technology startups. ✅ Connect with Ashim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashim-datta-5201b440/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Product Management & Data Science: A Love Story - Aditya Sthanunathan

Aug 28, 2025

Learn how product management and data science at The Home Depot came together to solve problems in small, empowered teams and ultimately grew to become bigger than the sum of their parts. Adi is obsessed about defining the next generation of e-commerce and is currently thinking about how retailers can build and deploy innovative solutions to customer problems at scale. Today, he leads a product organization at The Home Depot’s e-commerce team that is responsible for how customers browse and navigate the retailer's extensive product assortment. Prior to The Home Depot, Adi spent five years at Kearney, a global management consultancy, where he led teams that advised senior executives at global CPGs and retailers on their most pressing growth and profitability challenges. He caught the product bug during a secondment from Kearney when he co-founded Smilables, an infant smart-wearable company that helps parents more actively engage in their newborn baby’s development. Adi holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Industrial & Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and currently lives in Atlanta, GA with his wife and two-year old daughter. ✅ Connect with Adi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adityast/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Building AI Applications from Scratch in a Day with Data-centric AI

Aug 28, 2025

Data is crucial to the success or failure in any AI application across all domains. Building data applications is an iterative process one instead of a one time ordeal. Snorkel has done programmatic data labeling at scale which has overcome major hurdles in enterprise where expert data labeling teams could not be scaled. In this talk you will understand the impact to your enterprise AI applications that result from leveraging your in-house expertise to scale your data-labeling efforts. Braden Hancock is the co-founder and Head of Engineering at Snorkel AI ✅ Connect with Braden: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradenhancock/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Monetizing Data Science - Justin Dale Collins

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk you will learn the need for data science in Retail and how Retail Media has been transformed by leveraging all the customer data sources that exist across different businesses units. You will learn how a Retail Media Network functions and how different analytical capabilities are required a different growth points. Justin Dale Collins is an Associate Principal, Customer Success at TheMathCompany ✅ Connect with Justin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-collins-data-scientist/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Building AI-based Recommendation Systems, a value-based approach - Xiquan Cui

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk you will learn how The Home Depot (largest home-improvement retailer) leverages Deep Learning for powering their recommender systems. The team leverages advanced techniques such as multi-task learning, active learning and information greedy algorithms for delivering personalized results for millions of customers. Xiquan Cui is the Sr. Manager of Data Science at The Home Depot ✅ Connect with Xiquan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xiquan-cui-%E5%B4%94%E5%96%9C%E6%B3%89-2486b115/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Needle in a Haystack: Novelty and Outlier Detection - Sarfaraz Hussein

Aug 28, 2025

• Novelty and Outlier Detection: Problem Definition • Significance of the problem • Causes of the Outliers • Applications of Novelty and Outlier Detection • Deep Learning based Outlier Detection Approaches • Out-of-Distribution Detection • Out-of-Distribution detection in Skin Cancer and Malaria images Dr. Sarfaraz Hussein is an Applied Scientist working on machine learning applications in e-commerce and healthcare. He has published several papers in leading conferences and journals including IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, and Information Processing in Medical Imaging. His research interests include classification and detection problems in machine learning, medical image analysis, computer vision and deep learning. He also serves as a reviewer for various journals and as speaker for Machine Learning and Data Science conferences. ✅ Connect with Sarfaraz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarfaraz-hussein-ph-d-9298648/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Model Deployment on GPUs: a Primer

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk you will learn about the best practices for deploying machine learning models on GPUs leveraging the open source project NVIDIA Triton. The talk will cover how GPUs save money for reasonable to large scale deployments and enable faster deployment of larger models. Features such as dynamic batching, concurrent model execution (multiple models on the GPU) are discussed. Benika Hall is a Senior Data Scientist/Solutions Architect at NVIDIA ✅ Connect with Benika: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benikahall/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Data Science for Web3: Building a Decentralized Web Search Engine

Aug 28, 2025

Building a web-scale search engine is hard, but building a decentralized search engine powered by over 70,000 heterogeneous devices run by users all across the world is even harder. In this talk, Presearch.com CTO Trey Grainger dives into the unique data science and search challenges associated with building a search engine based upon web3 principles, where the crawlers, indexers, search nodes, and inference models, and ranking algorithms all need to be run and validated across a massive, global peer-to-peer network. You'll see how "decentralized data science" forces new and unique approaches to many traditional search and data science problems. Trey Grainger is CTO at Presearch, the decentralized web search engine. He is also the Founder of Searchkernel, a startup helping clients build next-generation, intelligent search applications. He is the author of the books AI-Powered Search and Solr in Action, and is the former Chief Algorithms Officer and SVP of Engineering at Lucidworks, a leading AI-powered search company. He studied information retrieval and web search at Stanford University, received his Masters in Management of Technology from Georgia Tech, and received his Bachelors degree from Furman University in Computer Science, Business, and Philosophy. ✅ Connect with Trey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/treygrainger/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Tales from the Field: Data Science Lessons Learned the Hard Way - Vijay Reddy

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk you will learn about how Google runs its professional services organizations and how they get machine learning applications to production. Vijay Reddy is the Head of AI Services, US East and LATAM at Google ✅ Connect with Vijay: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijaykyr/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

How Feature Stores save you from the Mundane - Rosie Min

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk you will learn about how Feature stores are an essential component to your data science workflows and how they can save significant time and reduce duplicate work to get your models to production faster. Rosie Min is an AI Consultant at Google ✅ Connect with Rosie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosiemm/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Vector Search and a Conversation with your users - Marcus Eagan

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk you will learn deeper levels of search and how there are many nuances to delivering great search in production. Search is a significant revenue driver across many industries, such as 700 Billion in revenue. You will walk away with a greater appreciation of the complexity of delivering great search that aligns with your user’s vocabulary and desires. Marcus Eagan is Staff Product Manager at MongoDB ✅ Connect with Marcus: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcuseagan/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Towards Responsible AI in Production for Consumer Product Organizations

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk you will learn all of the factors that you should consider for making sure your production based machine learning models are following best practices on leveraging customer data. Responsible AI means taking into account the human aspect of AI applications and ensuring effective guardrails in production. Aishwarya Srinivasan is a Data Scientist at Google Cloud and a LinkedIn Top Voice Data & AI (300K+ Followers) ✅ Connect with Aishwarya: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aishwarya-srinivasan/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Building a Security Analytics Platform using Federated Machine Learning

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk you will learn about how federated machine learning is applied for anomaly detection within applications deployed on VMWare. Dennis Ramdass is a Director of Engineering in the Advanced Technology Group at VMWare ✅ Connect with Dennis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennis-ramdass-98425718/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Keras: Deep Learning Made Easier - Divya Sreepathihalli

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk you will learn about the latest updates with the Keras deep learning project at Google. Divya Sreepathihalli is an ML Engineer at Google Connect with Divya Sreepathihalli on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/divyashreess/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Machine Learning at Tubi: Powering Free Movies, TV and News for All - Jaya Kawale

Aug 28, 2025

Tubi is an advertiser based video on demand (AVOD) service that allows users to watch content available online for free with ads. There are three key pillars in an AVOD service, namely, content, audience and ads. These three pillars necessitate the application of Machine Learning to help improve the overall product. In this talk, I will present some of the lessons learned and unsolved challenges in productionizing large scale recommender and content understanding systems. Jaya Kawale is the VP of Engineering at Tubi, leading all the Machine Learning efforts at the company. She did her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota on Graph based approaches for spatio-temporal datasets. Her thesis won several awards including the "Explorations in Science through Computation" award presented at the Super Computing conference. She has published several papers in top tier conferences and has authored several patents. In the past, she has worked at Netflix, Adobe Research, Microsoft Research and Yahoo Research. ✅ Connect with Jaya: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayakawale/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Data Science Recruitment Market

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk, you will learn about the current state of the Data Science Hiring market in the US and globally. The panelists have a combined experience of over 40 years in industry within the hiring and technology space. Abdel Tefridj is the Chief Product and Technical Officer at Data Bid Machine and has held several leadership positions at leading technology firms such as The Home Depot and Career Builder Marcus Sawyerr is the Founder/CEO of EQ Community, an online platform for diversity recruiting at scale. He has held several leadership positions in top technical firms such as Adecco Group and Career Builder Khalifeh Al Jadda is a Director of Data Science at Google and the founder of the Southern Data Science Conference ✅ Connect with Abdel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abdel-tefridj-innovation/ ✅ Connect with Marcus: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcus-sawyerr-593a716/details/experience/ ✅ Connect with Khalifej: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khalifeh-al-jadda-ph-d-929a5020/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Computational Jobs Marketplace - Liangjie Hong

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk, you will learn all the machine learning that needs to take place to get great recommendations in an online marketplace. In this case, the focus is the jobs marketplace at LinkedIn that can have hundreds of thousands of jobs to millions at any given time. The talk covers • Online Jobs Marketplace • Optimizing Hiring Outcomes • Computational Jobs Marketplace Liangjie Hong is a Director of Engineering AI at LinkedIn ✅ Connect with Liangjie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liangjiehong/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

From Model to Microservice - MLOps at Scale - Joshua Goldstein

Aug 28, 2025

In this talk you will learn how to easily package your ML models for deployment with the open source project Seldon Core. Deployment of ML models to production is not a trivial task so you will learn some best practices Joshua Goldstein is a Solutions Engineer at Seldon ✅ Connect with Joshua: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshsgoldstein/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/

Embracing SQL in Data Science Workflows - Aaron Richter

Aug 28, 2025

While data scientists typically need SQL to retrieve datasets, often the interaction with the database stops there and data manipulation continues in Python or R. This talk presents the case for embracing SQL further down the tool chain in notebooks and even ML. Additionally, Aaron presents the SQL tools used at Squarespace for Python packages and Jupyter notebooks. Aaron Richter is a software developer with a passion for all things data. His work involves making sure data is clean and accessible, and that the tools to access it are at peak performance. Aaron is currently a data engineer at Squarespace, where he supports the company’s analytics platform. Previously, he built the data warehouse at Modernizing Medicine, and worked as a data science advocate at Saturn Cloud. He has given talks at several major data conferences, including PyData, Spark Summit, and ODSC. Aaron is based in NYC and holds a PhD in machine learning from Florida Atlantic University. ✅ Connect with Aaron: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rikturr/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/oaiconference/ ✅ Connect with Optimized AI Conference on Twitter: https://x.com/southerndsc ✅ Visit Optimized AI Conference Website - https://www.oaiconference.com/