In this keynote, I will share the lessons learned from using Python in 4 industries. Apart from machine learning applications that I build in my day to day as a data scientist and machine learning engineer, I also use Python to develop games for my own gaming company, Quill Game Studios. There is a lot of versatility in Python, and it's been my pleasure to use it to solve many interesting problems. I hope that this talk can give inspiration to various types of applications in your own industry as well.

AutoML, or automated machine learning, offers the promise of transforming raw data into accurate predictions with minimal human intervention, expertise, and manual experimentation. In this talk, we will introduce AutoGluon, a cutting-edge toolkit that enables AutoML for tabular, multimodal and time series data. AutoGluon emphasizes usability, enabling a wide variety of tasks from regression to time series forecasting and image classification through a unified and intuitive API. We will specifically focus on tasks on tabular and time series tasks where AutoGluon is the current state-of-the-art, and demonstrate how AutoGluon can be used to achieve competitive performance on tabular and time series competition data sets. We will also discuss the techniques used to automatically build and train these models, peeking under the hood of AutoGluon.

In the last years, Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO) became a fundamental step in the training of Machine Learning (ML) models and in the creation of automatic ML pipelines. Unfortunately, while HPO improves the predictive performance of the final model, it comes with a significant cost both in terms of computational resources and waiting time. This leads many practitioners to try to lower the cost of HPO by employing unreliable heuristics.

In this talk we will provide simple and practical algorithms for users that want to train models with almost-optimal predictive performance, while incurring in a significantly lower cost and waiting time. The presented algorithms are agnostic to the application and the model being trained so they can be useful in a wide range of scenarios.

We provide results from an extensive experimental activity on public benchmarks, including comparisons with well-known techniques like Bayesian Optimization (BO), ASHA, Successive Halving. We will describe in which scenarios the biggest gains are observed (up to 30x) and provide examples for how to use these algorithms in a real-world environment.

All the code used for this talk is available on (GitHub)[https://github.com/awslabs/syne-tune].

In this talk, I'll show how large language models such as GPT-3 complement rather than replace existing machine learning workflows. Initial annotations are gathered from the OpenAI API via zero- or few-shot learning, and then corrected by a human decision maker using an annotation tool. The resulting annotations can then be used to train and evaluate models as normal. This process results in higher accuracy than can be achieved from the OpenAI API alone, with the added benefit that you'll own and control the model for runtime.

The industrial environment offers a lot of interesting use cases for data enthusiasts. There are myriads of interesting challenges that can be solved by data scientists. However, collecting industrial data in general and industrial IoT (IIoT) data in particular, is cumbersome and not really appealing for anyone who just wants to work with data. Apache StreamPipes addresses this pitfall and allows anyone to extract data from IIoT data sources without messing around with (old-fashioned) protocols. In addition, StreamPipes newly developed Python client now gives Pythonistas the ability to programmatically access and work with them in a Pythonic way.

This talk will provide a basic introduction into the functionality of Apache StreamPipes itself, followed by a deeper discussion of the Python client. Finally, a live demo will show how IIoT data can be easily derived in Python and used directly for visualization and ML model training.

What is a ML platform and do you even need one? When should you consider investing in your own ML platform? What challenges can you expect building and maintaining one? Tune in and discover (some) answers to these questions and more! I will share a first-hand account of our ongoing journey towards becoming a ML platform team within Delivery Hero's Logistics department, including how we got here, how we structure our work, and what challenges and tools we are focussing on next.