Managing Machine Learning Projects

Simon has been building and running ML projects since 1994 (when he started his Ph.D. in MachineLearning). His first commercial project was for the Royal Navy, and since then he has worked in Telecom, Defense, Consultancy, Manufacturing, and Finance. This means Simon has experienced a wide range of working environments and different types of projects. As well as working in a variety of commercial environments Simon collaborated on EU research projects, UK Government funded research projects and worked as an industrial rep on three MIT consortia (BigData@CSAIL, Systems That Learn, and the CISR Data Research Board).

Simon was also an industrial fellow at the Alan Turing Institute for a year. This means that he has also seen a lot of the communities' practices and concerns as they developed, and he had the chance to put them into use in a commercial environment.

Right now, Simon is working for a technology consultancy called GFT, and his job there is primarily to deliver ML projects for companies in the capital markets such as investment banks, although we also do work in retail banking, insurance, and manufacturing.

At the moment Demetrios is immersing himself in Machine Learning by interviewing experts from around the world in the weekly MLOps.community meetups. Demetrios is constantly learning and engaging in new activities to get uncomfortable and learn from his mistakes. He tries to bring creativity into every aspect of his life, whether that be analyzing the best paths forward, overcoming obstacles, or building lego houses with his daughter.

Abi is a machine learning engineer and an independent consultant with over 7 years of experience in the industry using ML research and adapting it to solve real-world engineering challenges for businesses for a wide range of companies ranging from e-commerce, insurance, education and media & entertainment where she is responsible for machine learning infrastructure design and model development, integration and deployment at scale for data analysis, computer vision, audio-speech synthesis as well as natural language processing. She is also currently writing and working in autonomous agents and evaluation frameworks for large language models as a researcher at Bolkay.

Prior to consulting, Abi was a visiting research scholar at UCLA working at the Cognitive Sciences Lab with Dr. Judea Pearl on developing intelligent agents and has authored research papers in AutoML and Reinforcement Learning (later accepted for poster presentation at AAAI 2020) and invited reviewer, area-chair and co-chair on multiple conferences including AABI 2023, PyData NYC ‘22, ACL ‘21, NeurIPS ‘18, PyData LA ‘18.