Interview with Illia polosukhin, Co-Founder xix.ai & Ex-Google Research - Speaker at Global Data Science Conf - March 2017 Posted on : Feb 28 - 2017

We feature speakers at Global Data Science Conference March 27 - 29, 2017 to catch up and find out what he or she is working on now and what's coming next. This week we're talking to Illia polosukhin, Co-Founder xix.ai & Ex-Google Research.

Interview with Illia polosukhin

1. Tell us about yourself and your background.
I'm a co-founder of XIX.ai, a YC-backed startup that builds the first artificial intelligence OS for smartphones. We are also the team behind the leading artificial intelligence community in San Francisco.
I'm originally from Ukraine, and recently worked at Google Research on TensorFlow and Natural Language Understanding.

2.  What have you been working on recently?
At XIX one of our main research challenges is to figure out driving factors of the user. By doing that, we will be able to predict what user wants at any time, recommend content or help them doing things in real world.

3. Where are we now today in terms of the state of Machine Learning, and where do you think we’ll go over the next five years?
Machine Learning had lots of big wins recently (Image understanding, text understanding, playing games), all of which were powered by a lot of data. All the successful approaches were both data hungry and doing supervised learning (even Alpha Go had a lot of supervised pre-training before doing Reinforcement Learning). Our algorithms got a lot smarter at finding patterns that explain phenomena we can point at abundance. 
I think next 5 years going to show advances on both sides: figuring out better unsupervised methods of learning and how to learn from less data for supervised use cases.

4. What would be your pitch to folks out there to join your XIX.ai? Why does your organization matter in the world?
Our core mission is to make people's life better through AI. We have a very strong team (background include OpenAI, Google Research, UC Berkeley Artificial Intelligence), we have lots of hard problems to solve and the opportunity to make a difference. Working on something meaningful, being around people from whom you can learn and see how people use your product is very rewarding, in my opinion.

5. What are some of the best takeaways that the attendees can have from your "In Depth TensorFlow" talk?
I want to empower people to build great applications with Deep Learning. By both explaining internals of Tensorflow that are frequently overlooked, give roadmap how to go from idea to working application and give inspiring examples.

6. What are the top 5 Data Science Use cases in enterprises?
Predictive analytics
Text understanding
Image/video understanding
Security, threat detection
Business Intelligence

7. Which company do you think is winning the global AI race?
I think race just started and the winners will be combination of companies that together form an eco-system of hardware, software, data and knowledge sharing.

8. Any closing remarks
I look forward to interactive session!