The holy grail of machine learning has always been a “Skynet” type of artificial intelligence that could generally learn anything (artificial general intelligence), and the biggest advancement toward achieving such A.I. is deep reinforcement learning (DRL). The reason for this is DRL’s ability to solve a vast array of problems; its application ranges from learning... Continue reading →

Meet Mary Ann Brennan (@mabmierau) presenting… Eliminating Machine Bias Mary Ann is a jack-of-all-trades software engineer with background in iOS and full-stack web at a bunch of startups you’ve probably never heard of. She’s currently using her extended maternity leave to refresh her studies in Artificial Intelligence, the concentration for her master’s in Computer Science... Continue reading →

Using Your Data to Give Your Customers Superpowers Kirsten Westeinde (@kmkwesteinde) is a technology enthusiast and a lifelong learner. Currently a senior software engineer at Shopify, where she solves challenging web development problems on the daily. She’s toiled and built apps and services with Ruby on Rails for greater than 5 years and is constantly... Continue reading →

Welcome the next two speakers I’m introducing: Jon Oropeza and Amy Cheng! ML Spends A Year In Burgundy Jon (@joropeza) is coming to Portland from Portland to speak to us about Cote d’Or in Burgundy! He’s a hacker, grape lover, and Portlander that loves a good smooth wine made out of those grapes he loves!... Continue reading →

While at Goto Conf in Chicago today I had two thoughts while talking with Joe (@joelaha) while hanging out with Bridget (@bridgetkromhout) while waiting for Lena’s (@lenadroid) talk on “Distributed Data Stores on Kubernetes“. All that wrapped up into a few ideas for future conferences. Here, I present them to you dear readers, please lament,... Continue reading →