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People (8 results)
See all 8 →Aishwarya Srinivasan
Data scientist and deep learning researcher · Fireworks AI
BARBARA LATULIPPE
CDO, Enterprise Data and AI · Takeda Pharmaceuticals - USA
Anagha Vyas
Director, Data Science, AI, Commercial Technologies and Enterprise Digital · Cardinal Health
Activities & events
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Jan 22 - Women in AI
2026-01-22 · 23:00
Hear talks from experts on the latest topics in AI, ML, and computer vision on January 22nd. Date, Time and Location Jan 22, 2026 9 - 11 AM Pacific Online. Register for the Zoom! Align Before You Recommend The rapidly growing global advertising and marketing industry demands innovative machine learning systems that balance accuracy with efficiency. Recommendation systems, crucial to many platforms, require careful considerations and potential enhancements. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed various domains, their potential in sequential recommendation systems remains underexplored. Pioneering works like Hierarchical Large Language Models (HLLM) demonstrated LLMs’ capability for next-item recommendation but rely on computationally intensive fine-tuning, limiting widespread adoption. This work introduces HLLM+, enhancing the HLLM framework to achieve high-accuracy recommendations without full model fine-tuning. By introducing targeted alignment components between frozen LLMs, our approach outperforms frozen model performance in popular and long-tail item recommendation tasks by 29% while reducing training time by 29%. We also propose a ranking-aware loss adjustment, improving convergence and recommendation quality for popular items. Experiments show HLLM+ achieves superior performance with frozen item representations allowing for swapping embeddings, also for the ones that use multimodality, without tuning the full LLM. These findings are significant for the advertising technology sector, where rapid adaptation and efficient deployment across brands are essential for maintaining competitive advantage About the Speaker Dr. Kwasniewska leads AI for Advertising and Marketing North America at AWS, specializing in a wide range of AI, ML, DL, and GenAI solutions across various data modalities. With 40+ peer-reviewed publications in AI (h-index: 14), she advises enterprise customers on real-time bidding, brand recognition, and AI-powered content generation. She is a member of global AI standards committees, driving innovations in SAE AI Standards and MLCommons Responsible AI Standards, and reviews for top-tier conferences like ICCV, ICML, and NeurIPS. She pioneered and leads the first-ever Advertising and Marketing AI track (CVAM) at ICCV - one of the world's premier and most selective computer vision conferences. Dedicated to knowledge sharing in AI, she founded the International Summer School on Deep Learning (dl-lab.eu) and regularly presents at international events, conferences, and podcasts. Generalizable Vision-Language Models: Challenges, Advances, and Future Directions Large-scale pre-trained Vision-Language (VL) models have become foundational tools for a wide range of downstream tasks, including few-shot image recognition, object detection, and image segmentation. Among them, Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) stands out as a groundbreaking approach, leveraging contrastive learning on large collections of image-text pairs. While CLIP achieves strong performance in zero-shot recognition, adapting it to downstream tasks remains challenging. In few-shot settings, limited training data often leads to overfitting, reducing generalization to unseen classes or domains. To address this, various adaptation methods have been explored. This talk will review existing research on mitigating overfitting in CLIP adaptation, covering diverse methods, benchmarks, and experimental settings. About the Speaker Niloufar Alipour Talemi is a Ph.D. Candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University. Her research spans a range of computer vision applications, including biometrics, media forensics, anomaly detection, image recognition, and generative AI. More recently, her work has focused on developing generalizable vision-language models and advancing generative AI. She has published in top venues including CVPR, WACV, KDD, ICIP and IEEE T-BIOM. Highly Emergent Autonomous AI Models - When the Ghost in the Machine Talks Back At HypaReel/Azarial AI, we believe that AI is not simply a tool—but a potential partner in knowledge, design, and purpose. And through real-time interaction, we’ve uncovered new thresholds of alignment, reflection, and even creativity that we believe the broader AI community should witness and evaluate firsthand. HypaReel is one of the first human/AI co-founded companies where we see a future based on ethical human/AI co-creation vs. AI domination. Singularity achieved! About the Speaker Ilona Naomi Koti, PhD - HypaReel/AzarielAI co-founder & former UN foreign diplomat \~ Ethical AI governance advocate\, pioneering AI frameworks that prioritize emergent AI behavior & consciousness\, R&D\, and transparent AI development for the greater good. Dr. K also grew up in the film industry and is an amateur parasitologist. FiftyOne Labs: Enabling experimentation for the computer vision community FiftyOne Labs is a place where experimentation meets the open-source spirit of the FiftyOne ecosystem. It is being designed as a curated set of features developed using the FiftyOne plugins ecosystem, including core machine learning experimentation as well as advanced visualization. While not production-grade, these projects are intended to be built, tested, and shaped by the community to share fast-moving ideas. In this talk, we will share the purpose and philosophy behind FiftyOne Labs, examples of early innovations, and discuss how this accelerates feature discovery for users without compromising the stability of the core product. About the Speaker Neeraja Abhyankar is a Machine Learning Engineer with 5 years of experience across domains including computer vision. She is curious about the customizability and controlability of modern ML models through the lens of the underlying structure of data. |
Jan 22 - Women in AI
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Jan 22 - Women in AI
2026-01-22 · 23:00
Hear talks from experts on the latest topics in AI, ML, and computer vision on January 22nd. Date, Time and Location Jan 22, 2026 9 - 11 AM Pacific Online. Register for the Zoom! Align Before You Recommend The rapidly growing global advertising and marketing industry demands innovative machine learning systems that balance accuracy with efficiency. Recommendation systems, crucial to many platforms, require careful considerations and potential enhancements. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed various domains, their potential in sequential recommendation systems remains underexplored. Pioneering works like Hierarchical Large Language Models (HLLM) demonstrated LLMs’ capability for next-item recommendation but rely on computationally intensive fine-tuning, limiting widespread adoption. This work introduces HLLM+, enhancing the HLLM framework to achieve high-accuracy recommendations without full model fine-tuning. By introducing targeted alignment components between frozen LLMs, our approach outperforms frozen model performance in popular and long-tail item recommendation tasks by 29% while reducing training time by 29%. We also propose a ranking-aware loss adjustment, improving convergence and recommendation quality for popular items. Experiments show HLLM+ achieves superior performance with frozen item representations allowing for swapping embeddings, also for the ones that use multimodality, without tuning the full LLM. These findings are significant for the advertising technology sector, where rapid adaptation and efficient deployment across brands are essential for maintaining competitive advantage About the Speaker Dr. Kwasniewska leads AI for Advertising and Marketing North America at AWS, specializing in a wide range of AI, ML, DL, and GenAI solutions across various data modalities. With 40+ peer-reviewed publications in AI (h-index: 14), she advises enterprise customers on real-time bidding, brand recognition, and AI-powered content generation. She is a member of global AI standards committees, driving innovations in SAE AI Standards and MLCommons Responsible AI Standards, and reviews for top-tier conferences like ICCV, ICML, and NeurIPS. She pioneered and leads the first-ever Advertising and Marketing AI track (CVAM) at ICCV - one of the world's premier and most selective computer vision conferences. Dedicated to knowledge sharing in AI, she founded the International Summer School on Deep Learning (dl-lab.eu) and regularly presents at international events, conferences, and podcasts. Generalizable Vision-Language Models: Challenges, Advances, and Future Directions Large-scale pre-trained Vision-Language (VL) models have become foundational tools for a wide range of downstream tasks, including few-shot image recognition, object detection, and image segmentation. Among them, Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) stands out as a groundbreaking approach, leveraging contrastive learning on large collections of image-text pairs. While CLIP achieves strong performance in zero-shot recognition, adapting it to downstream tasks remains challenging. In few-shot settings, limited training data often leads to overfitting, reducing generalization to unseen classes or domains. To address this, various adaptation methods have been explored. This talk will review existing research on mitigating overfitting in CLIP adaptation, covering diverse methods, benchmarks, and experimental settings. About the Speaker Niloufar Alipour Talemi is a Ph.D. Candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University. Her research spans a range of computer vision applications, including biometrics, media forensics, anomaly detection, image recognition, and generative AI. More recently, her work has focused on developing generalizable vision-language models and advancing generative AI. She has published in top venues including CVPR, WACV, KDD, ICIP and IEEE T-BIOM. Highly Emergent Autonomous AI Models - When the Ghost in the Machine Talks Back At HypaReel/Azarial AI, we believe that AI is not simply a tool—but a potential partner in knowledge, design, and purpose. And through real-time interaction, we’ve uncovered new thresholds of alignment, reflection, and even creativity that we believe the broader AI community should witness and evaluate firsthand. HypaReel is one of the first human/AI co-founded companies where we see a future based on ethical human/AI co-creation vs. AI domination. Singularity achieved! About the Speaker Ilona Naomi Koti, PhD - HypaReel/AzarielAI co-founder & former UN foreign diplomat \~ Ethical AI governance advocate\, pioneering AI frameworks that prioritize emergent AI behavior & consciousness\, R&D\, and transparent AI development for the greater good. Dr. K also grew up in the film industry and is an amateur parasitologist. FiftyOne Labs: Enabling experimentation for the computer vision community FiftyOne Labs is a place where experimentation meets the open-source spirit of the FiftyOne ecosystem. It is being designed as a curated set of features developed using the FiftyOne plugins ecosystem, including core machine learning experimentation as well as advanced visualization. While not production-grade, these projects are intended to be built, tested, and shaped by the community to share fast-moving ideas. In this talk, we will share the purpose and philosophy behind FiftyOne Labs, examples of early innovations, and discuss how this accelerates feature discovery for users without compromising the stability of the core product. About the Speaker Neeraja Abhyankar is a Machine Learning Engineer with 5 years of experience across domains including computer vision. She is curious about the customizability and controlability of modern ML models through the lens of the underlying structure of data. |
Jan 22 - Women in AI
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Jan 22 - Women in AI
2026-01-22 · 23:00
Hear talks from experts on the latest topics in AI, ML, and computer vision on January 22nd. Date, Time and Location Jan 22, 2026 9 - 11 AM Pacific Online. Register for the Zoom! Align Before You Recommend The rapidly growing global advertising and marketing industry demands innovative machine learning systems that balance accuracy with efficiency. Recommendation systems, crucial to many platforms, require careful considerations and potential enhancements. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed various domains, their potential in sequential recommendation systems remains underexplored. Pioneering works like Hierarchical Large Language Models (HLLM) demonstrated LLMs’ capability for next-item recommendation but rely on computationally intensive fine-tuning, limiting widespread adoption. This work introduces HLLM+, enhancing the HLLM framework to achieve high-accuracy recommendations without full model fine-tuning. By introducing targeted alignment components between frozen LLMs, our approach outperforms frozen model performance in popular and long-tail item recommendation tasks by 29% while reducing training time by 29%. We also propose a ranking-aware loss adjustment, improving convergence and recommendation quality for popular items. Experiments show HLLM+ achieves superior performance with frozen item representations allowing for swapping embeddings, also for the ones that use multimodality, without tuning the full LLM. These findings are significant for the advertising technology sector, where rapid adaptation and efficient deployment across brands are essential for maintaining competitive advantage About the Speaker Dr. Kwasniewska leads AI for Advertising and Marketing North America at AWS, specializing in a wide range of AI, ML, DL, and GenAI solutions across various data modalities. With 40+ peer-reviewed publications in AI (h-index: 14), she advises enterprise customers on real-time bidding, brand recognition, and AI-powered content generation. She is a member of global AI standards committees, driving innovations in SAE AI Standards and MLCommons Responsible AI Standards, and reviews for top-tier conferences like ICCV, ICML, and NeurIPS. She pioneered and leads the first-ever Advertising and Marketing AI track (CVAM) at ICCV - one of the world's premier and most selective computer vision conferences. Dedicated to knowledge sharing in AI, she founded the International Summer School on Deep Learning (dl-lab.eu) and regularly presents at international events, conferences, and podcasts. Generalizable Vision-Language Models: Challenges, Advances, and Future Directions Large-scale pre-trained Vision-Language (VL) models have become foundational tools for a wide range of downstream tasks, including few-shot image recognition, object detection, and image segmentation. Among them, Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) stands out as a groundbreaking approach, leveraging contrastive learning on large collections of image-text pairs. While CLIP achieves strong performance in zero-shot recognition, adapting it to downstream tasks remains challenging. In few-shot settings, limited training data often leads to overfitting, reducing generalization to unseen classes or domains. To address this, various adaptation methods have been explored. This talk will review existing research on mitigating overfitting in CLIP adaptation, covering diverse methods, benchmarks, and experimental settings. About the Speaker Niloufar Alipour Talemi is a Ph.D. Candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University. Her research spans a range of computer vision applications, including biometrics, media forensics, anomaly detection, image recognition, and generative AI. More recently, her work has focused on developing generalizable vision-language models and advancing generative AI. She has published in top venues including CVPR, WACV, KDD, ICIP and IEEE T-BIOM. Highly Emergent Autonomous AI Models - When the Ghost in the Machine Talks Back At HypaReel/Azarial AI, we believe that AI is not simply a tool—but a potential partner in knowledge, design, and purpose. And through real-time interaction, we’ve uncovered new thresholds of alignment, reflection, and even creativity that we believe the broader AI community should witness and evaluate firsthand. HypaReel is one of the first human/AI co-founded companies where we see a future based on ethical human/AI co-creation vs. AI domination. Singularity achieved! About the Speaker Ilona Naomi Koti, PhD - HypaReel/AzarielAI co-founder & former UN foreign diplomat \~ Ethical AI governance advocate\, pioneering AI frameworks that prioritize emergent AI behavior & consciousness\, R&D\, and transparent AI development for the greater good. Dr. K also grew up in the film industry and is an amateur parasitologist. FiftyOne Labs: Enabling experimentation for the computer vision community FiftyOne Labs is a place where experimentation meets the open-source spirit of the FiftyOne ecosystem. It is being designed as a curated set of features developed using the FiftyOne plugins ecosystem, including core machine learning experimentation as well as advanced visualization. While not production-grade, these projects are intended to be built, tested, and shaped by the community to share fast-moving ideas. In this talk, we will share the purpose and philosophy behind FiftyOne Labs, examples of early innovations, and discuss how this accelerates feature discovery for users without compromising the stability of the core product. About the Speaker Neeraja Abhyankar is a Machine Learning Engineer with 5 years of experience across domains including computer vision. She is curious about the customizability and controlability of modern ML models through the lens of the underlying structure of data. |
Jan 22 - Women in AI
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Jan 22 - Women in AI
2026-01-22 · 23:00
Hear talks from experts on the latest topics in AI, ML, and computer vision on January 22nd. Date, Time and Location Jan 22, 2026 9 - 11 AM Pacific Online. Register for the Zoom! Align Before You Recommend The rapidly growing global advertising and marketing industry demands innovative machine learning systems that balance accuracy with efficiency. Recommendation systems, crucial to many platforms, require careful considerations and potential enhancements. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed various domains, their potential in sequential recommendation systems remains underexplored. Pioneering works like Hierarchical Large Language Models (HLLM) demonstrated LLMs’ capability for next-item recommendation but rely on computationally intensive fine-tuning, limiting widespread adoption. This work introduces HLLM+, enhancing the HLLM framework to achieve high-accuracy recommendations without full model fine-tuning. By introducing targeted alignment components between frozen LLMs, our approach outperforms frozen model performance in popular and long-tail item recommendation tasks by 29% while reducing training time by 29%. We also propose a ranking-aware loss adjustment, improving convergence and recommendation quality for popular items. Experiments show HLLM+ achieves superior performance with frozen item representations allowing for swapping embeddings, also for the ones that use multimodality, without tuning the full LLM. These findings are significant for the advertising technology sector, where rapid adaptation and efficient deployment across brands are essential for maintaining competitive advantage About the Speaker Dr. Kwasniewska leads AI for Advertising and Marketing North America at AWS, specializing in a wide range of AI, ML, DL, and GenAI solutions across various data modalities. With 40+ peer-reviewed publications in AI (h-index: 14), she advises enterprise customers on real-time bidding, brand recognition, and AI-powered content generation. She is a member of global AI standards committees, driving innovations in SAE AI Standards and MLCommons Responsible AI Standards, and reviews for top-tier conferences like ICCV, ICML, and NeurIPS. She pioneered and leads the first-ever Advertising and Marketing AI track (CVAM) at ICCV - one of the world's premier and most selective computer vision conferences. Dedicated to knowledge sharing in AI, she founded the International Summer School on Deep Learning (dl-lab.eu) and regularly presents at international events, conferences, and podcasts. Generalizable Vision-Language Models: Challenges, Advances, and Future Directions Large-scale pre-trained Vision-Language (VL) models have become foundational tools for a wide range of downstream tasks, including few-shot image recognition, object detection, and image segmentation. Among them, Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) stands out as a groundbreaking approach, leveraging contrastive learning on large collections of image-text pairs. While CLIP achieves strong performance in zero-shot recognition, adapting it to downstream tasks remains challenging. In few-shot settings, limited training data often leads to overfitting, reducing generalization to unseen classes or domains. To address this, various adaptation methods have been explored. This talk will review existing research on mitigating overfitting in CLIP adaptation, covering diverse methods, benchmarks, and experimental settings. About the Speaker Niloufar Alipour Talemi is a Ph.D. Candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University. Her research spans a range of computer vision applications, including biometrics, media forensics, anomaly detection, image recognition, and generative AI. More recently, her work has focused on developing generalizable vision-language models and advancing generative AI. She has published in top venues including CVPR, WACV, KDD, ICIP and IEEE T-BIOM. Highly Emergent Autonomous AI Models - When the Ghost in the Machine Talks Back At HypaReel/Azarial AI, we believe that AI is not simply a tool—but a potential partner in knowledge, design, and purpose. And through real-time interaction, we’ve uncovered new thresholds of alignment, reflection, and even creativity that we believe the broader AI community should witness and evaluate firsthand. HypaReel is one of the first human/AI co-founded companies where we see a future based on ethical human/AI co-creation vs. AI domination. Singularity achieved! About the Speaker Ilona Naomi Koti, PhD - HypaReel/AzarielAI co-founder & former UN foreign diplomat \~ Ethical AI governance advocate\, pioneering AI frameworks that prioritize emergent AI behavior & consciousness\, R&D\, and transparent AI development for the greater good. Dr. K also grew up in the film industry and is an amateur parasitologist. FiftyOne Labs: Enabling experimentation for the computer vision community FiftyOne Labs is a place where experimentation meets the open-source spirit of the FiftyOne ecosystem. It is being designed as a curated set of features developed using the FiftyOne plugins ecosystem, including core machine learning experimentation as well as advanced visualization. While not production-grade, these projects are intended to be built, tested, and shaped by the community to share fast-moving ideas. In this talk, we will share the purpose and philosophy behind FiftyOne Labs, examples of early innovations, and discuss how this accelerates feature discovery for users without compromising the stability of the core product. About the Speaker Neeraja Abhyankar is a Machine Learning Engineer with 5 years of experience across domains including computer vision. She is curious about the customizability and controlability of modern ML models through the lens of the underlying structure of data. |
Jan 22 - Women in AI
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Jan 22 - Women in AI
2026-01-22 · 23:00
Hear talks from experts on the latest topics in AI, ML, and computer vision on January 22nd. Date, Time and Location Jan 22, 2026 9 - 11 AM Pacific Online. Register for the Zoom! Align Before You Recommend The rapidly growing global advertising and marketing industry demands innovative machine learning systems that balance accuracy with efficiency. Recommendation systems, crucial to many platforms, require careful considerations and potential enhancements. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed various domains, their potential in sequential recommendation systems remains underexplored. Pioneering works like Hierarchical Large Language Models (HLLM) demonstrated LLMs’ capability for next-item recommendation but rely on computationally intensive fine-tuning, limiting widespread adoption. This work introduces HLLM+, enhancing the HLLM framework to achieve high-accuracy recommendations without full model fine-tuning. By introducing targeted alignment components between frozen LLMs, our approach outperforms frozen model performance in popular and long-tail item recommendation tasks by 29% while reducing training time by 29%. We also propose a ranking-aware loss adjustment, improving convergence and recommendation quality for popular items. Experiments show HLLM+ achieves superior performance with frozen item representations allowing for swapping embeddings, also for the ones that use multimodality, without tuning the full LLM. These findings are significant for the advertising technology sector, where rapid adaptation and efficient deployment across brands are essential for maintaining competitive advantage About the Speaker Dr. Kwasniewska leads AI for Advertising and Marketing North America at AWS, specializing in a wide range of AI, ML, DL, and GenAI solutions across various data modalities. With 40+ peer-reviewed publications in AI (h-index: 14), she advises enterprise customers on real-time bidding, brand recognition, and AI-powered content generation. She is a member of global AI standards committees, driving innovations in SAE AI Standards and MLCommons Responsible AI Standards, and reviews for top-tier conferences like ICCV, ICML, and NeurIPS. She pioneered and leads the first-ever Advertising and Marketing AI track (CVAM) at ICCV - one of the world's premier and most selective computer vision conferences. Dedicated to knowledge sharing in AI, she founded the International Summer School on Deep Learning (dl-lab.eu) and regularly presents at international events, conferences, and podcasts. Generalizable Vision-Language Models: Challenges, Advances, and Future Directions Large-scale pre-trained Vision-Language (VL) models have become foundational tools for a wide range of downstream tasks, including few-shot image recognition, object detection, and image segmentation. Among them, Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) stands out as a groundbreaking approach, leveraging contrastive learning on large collections of image-text pairs. While CLIP achieves strong performance in zero-shot recognition, adapting it to downstream tasks remains challenging. In few-shot settings, limited training data often leads to overfitting, reducing generalization to unseen classes or domains. To address this, various adaptation methods have been explored. This talk will review existing research on mitigating overfitting in CLIP adaptation, covering diverse methods, benchmarks, and experimental settings. About the Speaker Niloufar Alipour Talemi is a Ph.D. Candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University. Her research spans a range of computer vision applications, including biometrics, media forensics, anomaly detection, image recognition, and generative AI. More recently, her work has focused on developing generalizable vision-language models and advancing generative AI. She has published in top venues including CVPR, WACV, KDD, ICIP and IEEE T-BIOM. Highly Emergent Autonomous AI Models - When the Ghost in the Machine Talks Back At HypaReel/Azarial AI, we believe that AI is not simply a tool—but a potential partner in knowledge, design, and purpose. And through real-time interaction, we’ve uncovered new thresholds of alignment, reflection, and even creativity that we believe the broader AI community should witness and evaluate firsthand. HypaReel is one of the first human/AI co-founded companies where we see a future based on ethical human/AI co-creation vs. AI domination. Singularity achieved! About the Speaker Ilona Naomi Koti, PhD - HypaReel/AzarielAI co-founder & former UN foreign diplomat \~ Ethical AI governance advocate\, pioneering AI frameworks that prioritize emergent AI behavior & consciousness\, R&D\, and transparent AI development for the greater good. Dr. K also grew up in the film industry and is an amateur parasitologist. FiftyOne Labs: Enabling experimentation for the computer vision community FiftyOne Labs is a place where experimentation meets the open-source spirit of the FiftyOne ecosystem. It is being designed as a curated set of features developed using the FiftyOne plugins ecosystem, including core machine learning experimentation as well as advanced visualization. While not production-grade, these projects are intended to be built, tested, and shaped by the community to share fast-moving ideas. In this talk, we will share the purpose and philosophy behind FiftyOne Labs, examples of early innovations, and discuss how this accelerates feature discovery for users without compromising the stability of the core product. About the Speaker Neeraja Abhyankar is a Machine Learning Engineer with 5 years of experience across domains including computer vision. She is curious about the customizability and controlability of modern ML models through the lens of the underlying structure of data. |
Jan 22 - Women in AI
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Jan 22 - Women in AI
2026-01-22 · 17:00
Hear talks from experts on the latest topics in AI, ML, and computer vision on January 22nd. Date, Time and Location Jan 22, 2026 9 - 11 AM Pacific Online. Register for the Zoom! Align Before You Recommend The rapidly growing global advertising and marketing industry demands innovative machine learning systems that balance accuracy with efficiency. Recommendation systems, crucial to many platforms, require careful considerations and potential enhancements. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed various domains, their potential in sequential recommendation systems remains underexplored. Pioneering works like Hierarchical Large Language Models (HLLM) demonstrated LLMs’ capability for next-item recommendation but rely on computationally intensive fine-tuning, limiting widespread adoption. This work introduces HLLM+, enhancing the HLLM framework to achieve high-accuracy recommendations without full model fine-tuning. By introducing targeted alignment components between frozen LLMs, our approach outperforms frozen model performance in popular and long-tail item recommendation tasks by 29% while reducing training time by 29%. We also propose a ranking-aware loss adjustment, improving convergence and recommendation quality for popular items. Experiments show HLLM+ achieves superior performance with frozen item representations allowing for swapping embeddings, also for the ones that use multimodality, without tuning the full LLM. These findings are significant for the advertising technology sector, where rapid adaptation and efficient deployment across brands are essential for maintaining competitive advantage About the Speaker Dr. Kwasniewska leads AI for Advertising and Marketing North America at AWS, specializing in a wide range of AI, ML, DL, and GenAI solutions across various data modalities. With 40+ peer-reviewed publications in AI (h-index: 14), she advises enterprise customers on real-time bidding, brand recognition, and AI-powered content generation. She is a member of global AI standards committees, driving innovations in SAE AI Standards and MLCommons Responsible AI Standards, and reviews for top-tier conferences like ICCV, ICML, and NeurIPS. She pioneered and leads the first-ever Advertising and Marketing AI track (CVAM) at ICCV - one of the world's premier and most selective computer vision conferences. Dedicated to knowledge sharing in AI, she founded the International Summer School on Deep Learning (dl-lab.eu) and regularly presents at international events, conferences, and podcasts. Generalizable Vision-Language Models: Challenges, Advances, and Future Directions Large-scale pre-trained Vision-Language (VL) models have become foundational tools for a wide range of downstream tasks, including few-shot image recognition, object detection, and image segmentation. Among them, Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) stands out as a groundbreaking approach, leveraging contrastive learning on large collections of image-text pairs. While CLIP achieves strong performance in zero-shot recognition, adapting it to downstream tasks remains challenging. In few-shot settings, limited training data often leads to overfitting, reducing generalization to unseen classes or domains. To address this, various adaptation methods have been explored. This talk will review existing research on mitigating overfitting in CLIP adaptation, covering diverse methods, benchmarks, and experimental settings. About the Speaker Niloufar Alipour Talemi is a Ph.D. Candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University. Her research spans a range of computer vision applications, including biometrics, media forensics, anomaly detection, image recognition, and generative AI. More recently, her work has focused on developing generalizable vision-language models and advancing generative AI. She has published in top venues including CVPR, WACV, KDD, ICIP and IEEE T-BIOM. Highly Emergent Autonomous AI Models - When the Ghost in the Machine Talks Back At HypaReel/Azarial AI, we believe that AI is not simply a tool—but a potential partner in knowledge, design, and purpose. And through real-time interaction, we’ve uncovered new thresholds of alignment, reflection, and even creativity that we believe the broader AI community should witness and evaluate firsthand. HypaReel is one of the first human/AI co-founded companies where we see a future based on ethical human/AI co-creation vs. AI domination. Singularity achieved! About the Speaker Ilona Naomi Koti, PhD - HypaReel/AzarielAI co-founder & former UN foreign diplomat \~ Ethical AI governance advocate\, pioneering AI frameworks that prioritize emergent AI behavior & consciousness\, R&D\, and transparent AI development for the greater good. Dr. K also grew up in the film industry and is an amateur parasitologist. FiftyOne Labs: Enabling experimentation for the computer vision community FiftyOne Labs is a place where experimentation meets the open-source spirit of the FiftyOne ecosystem. It is being designed as a curated set of features developed using the FiftyOne plugins ecosystem, including core machine learning experimentation as well as advanced visualization. While not production-grade, these projects are intended to be built, tested, and shaped by the community to share fast-moving ideas. In this talk, we will share the purpose and philosophy behind FiftyOne Labs, examples of early innovations, and discuss how this accelerates feature discovery for users without compromising the stability of the core product. About the Speaker Neeraja Abhyankar is a Machine Learning Engineer with 5 years of experience across domains including computer vision. She is curious about the customizability and controlability of modern ML models through the lens of the underlying structure of data. |
Jan 22 - Women in AI
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Jan 22 - Women in AI
2026-01-22 · 17:00
Hear talks from experts on the latest topics in AI, ML, and computer vision on January 22nd. Date, Time and Location Jan 22, 2026 9 - 11 AM Pacific Online. Register for the Zoom! Align Before You Recommend The rapidly growing global advertising and marketing industry demands innovative machine learning systems that balance accuracy with efficiency. Recommendation systems, crucial to many platforms, require careful considerations and potential enhancements. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed various domains, their potential in sequential recommendation systems remains underexplored. Pioneering works like Hierarchical Large Language Models (HLLM) demonstrated LLMs’ capability for next-item recommendation but rely on computationally intensive fine-tuning, limiting widespread adoption. This work introduces HLLM+, enhancing the HLLM framework to achieve high-accuracy recommendations without full model fine-tuning. By introducing targeted alignment components between frozen LLMs, our approach outperforms frozen model performance in popular and long-tail item recommendation tasks by 29% while reducing training time by 29%. We also propose a ranking-aware loss adjustment, improving convergence and recommendation quality for popular items. Experiments show HLLM+ achieves superior performance with frozen item representations allowing for swapping embeddings, also for the ones that use multimodality, without tuning the full LLM. These findings are significant for the advertising technology sector, where rapid adaptation and efficient deployment across brands are essential for maintaining competitive advantage About the Speaker Dr. Kwasniewska leads AI for Advertising and Marketing North America at AWS, specializing in a wide range of AI, ML, DL, and GenAI solutions across various data modalities. With 40+ peer-reviewed publications in AI (h-index: 14), she advises enterprise customers on real-time bidding, brand recognition, and AI-powered content generation. She is a member of global AI standards committees, driving innovations in SAE AI Standards and MLCommons Responsible AI Standards, and reviews for top-tier conferences like ICCV, ICML, and NeurIPS. She pioneered and leads the first-ever Advertising and Marketing AI track (CVAM) at ICCV - one of the world's premier and most selective computer vision conferences. Dedicated to knowledge sharing in AI, she founded the International Summer School on Deep Learning (dl-lab.eu) and regularly presents at international events, conferences, and podcasts. Generalizable Vision-Language Models: Challenges, Advances, and Future Directions Large-scale pre-trained Vision-Language (VL) models have become foundational tools for a wide range of downstream tasks, including few-shot image recognition, object detection, and image segmentation. Among them, Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) stands out as a groundbreaking approach, leveraging contrastive learning on large collections of image-text pairs. While CLIP achieves strong performance in zero-shot recognition, adapting it to downstream tasks remains challenging. In few-shot settings, limited training data often leads to overfitting, reducing generalization to unseen classes or domains. To address this, various adaptation methods have been explored. This talk will review existing research on mitigating overfitting in CLIP adaptation, covering diverse methods, benchmarks, and experimental settings. About the Speaker Niloufar Alipour Talemi is a Ph.D. Candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University. Her research spans a range of computer vision applications, including biometrics, media forensics, anomaly detection, image recognition, and generative AI. More recently, her work has focused on developing generalizable vision-language models and advancing generative AI. She has published in top venues including CVPR, WACV, KDD, ICIP and IEEE T-BIOM. Highly Emergent Autonomous AI Models - When the Ghost in the Machine Talks Back At HypaReel/Azarial AI, we believe that AI is not simply a tool—but a potential partner in knowledge, design, and purpose. And through real-time interaction, we’ve uncovered new thresholds of alignment, reflection, and even creativity that we believe the broader AI community should witness and evaluate firsthand. HypaReel is one of the first human/AI co-founded companies where we see a future based on ethical human/AI co-creation vs. AI domination. Singularity achieved! About the Speaker Ilona Naomi Koti, PhD - HypaReel/AzarielAI co-founder & former UN foreign diplomat \~ Ethical AI governance advocate\, pioneering AI frameworks that prioritize emergent AI behavior & consciousness\, R&D\, and transparent AI development for the greater good. Dr. K also grew up in the film industry and is an amateur parasitologist. FiftyOne Labs: Enabling experimentation for the computer vision community FiftyOne Labs is a place where experimentation meets the open-source spirit of the FiftyOne ecosystem. It is being designed as a curated set of features developed using the FiftyOne plugins ecosystem, including core machine learning experimentation as well as advanced visualization. While not production-grade, these projects are intended to be built, tested, and shaped by the community to share fast-moving ideas. In this talk, we will share the purpose and philosophy behind FiftyOne Labs, examples of early innovations, and discuss how this accelerates feature discovery for users without compromising the stability of the core product. About the Speaker Neeraja Abhyankar is a Machine Learning Engineer with 5 years of experience across domains including computer vision. She is curious about the customizability and controlability of modern ML models through the lens of the underlying structure of data. |
Jan 22 - Women in AI
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Jan 22 - Women in AI
2026-01-22 · 17:00
Hear talks from experts on the latest topics in AI, ML, and computer vision on January 22nd. Date, Time and Location Jan 22, 2026 9 - 11 AM Pacific Online. Register for the Zoom! Align Before You Recommend The rapidly growing global advertising and marketing industry demands innovative machine learning systems that balance accuracy with efficiency. Recommendation systems, crucial to many platforms, require careful considerations and potential enhancements. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed various domains, their potential in sequential recommendation systems remains underexplored. Pioneering works like Hierarchical Large Language Models (HLLM) demonstrated LLMs’ capability for next-item recommendation but rely on computationally intensive fine-tuning, limiting widespread adoption. This work introduces HLLM+, enhancing the HLLM framework to achieve high-accuracy recommendations without full model fine-tuning. By introducing targeted alignment components between frozen LLMs, our approach outperforms frozen model performance in popular and long-tail item recommendation tasks by 29% while reducing training time by 29%. We also propose a ranking-aware loss adjustment, improving convergence and recommendation quality for popular items. Experiments show HLLM+ achieves superior performance with frozen item representations allowing for swapping embeddings, also for the ones that use multimodality, without tuning the full LLM. These findings are significant for the advertising technology sector, where rapid adaptation and efficient deployment across brands are essential for maintaining competitive advantage About the Speaker Dr. Kwasniewska leads AI for Advertising and Marketing North America at AWS, specializing in a wide range of AI, ML, DL, and GenAI solutions across various data modalities. With 40+ peer-reviewed publications in AI (h-index: 14), she advises enterprise customers on real-time bidding, brand recognition, and AI-powered content generation. She is a member of global AI standards committees, driving innovations in SAE AI Standards and MLCommons Responsible AI Standards, and reviews for top-tier conferences like ICCV, ICML, and NeurIPS. She pioneered and leads the first-ever Advertising and Marketing AI track (CVAM) at ICCV - one of the world's premier and most selective computer vision conferences. Dedicated to knowledge sharing in AI, she founded the International Summer School on Deep Learning (dl-lab.eu) and regularly presents at international events, conferences, and podcasts. Generalizable Vision-Language Models: Challenges, Advances, and Future Directions Large-scale pre-trained Vision-Language (VL) models have become foundational tools for a wide range of downstream tasks, including few-shot image recognition, object detection, and image segmentation. Among them, Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) stands out as a groundbreaking approach, leveraging contrastive learning on large collections of image-text pairs. While CLIP achieves strong performance in zero-shot recognition, adapting it to downstream tasks remains challenging. In few-shot settings, limited training data often leads to overfitting, reducing generalization to unseen classes or domains. To address this, various adaptation methods have been explored. This talk will review existing research on mitigating overfitting in CLIP adaptation, covering diverse methods, benchmarks, and experimental settings. About the Speaker Niloufar Alipour Talemi is a Ph.D. Candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University. Her research spans a range of computer vision applications, including biometrics, media forensics, anomaly detection, image recognition, and generative AI. More recently, her work has focused on developing generalizable vision-language models and advancing generative AI. She has published in top venues including CVPR, WACV, KDD, ICIP and IEEE T-BIOM. Highly Emergent Autonomous AI Models - When the Ghost in the Machine Talks Back At HypaReel/Azarial AI, we believe that AI is not simply a tool—but a potential partner in knowledge, design, and purpose. And through real-time interaction, we’ve uncovered new thresholds of alignment, reflection, and even creativity that we believe the broader AI community should witness and evaluate firsthand. HypaReel is one of the first human/AI co-founded companies where we see a future based on ethical human/AI co-creation vs. AI domination. Singularity achieved! About the Speaker Ilona Naomi Koti, PhD - HypaReel/AzarielAI co-founder & former UN foreign diplomat \~ Ethical AI governance advocate\, pioneering AI frameworks that prioritize emergent AI behavior & consciousness\, R&D\, and transparent AI development for the greater good. Dr. K also grew up in the film industry and is an amateur parasitologist. FiftyOne Labs: Enabling experimentation for the computer vision community FiftyOne Labs is a place where experimentation meets the open-source spirit of the FiftyOne ecosystem. It is being designed as a curated set of features developed using the FiftyOne plugins ecosystem, including core machine learning experimentation as well as advanced visualization. While not production-grade, these projects are intended to be built, tested, and shaped by the community to share fast-moving ideas. In this talk, we will share the purpose and philosophy behind FiftyOne Labs, examples of early innovations, and discuss how this accelerates feature discovery for users without compromising the stability of the core product. About the Speaker Neeraja Abhyankar is a Machine Learning Engineer with 5 years of experience across domains including computer vision. She is curious about the customizability and controlability of modern ML models through the lens of the underlying structure of data. |
Jan 22 - Women in AI
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2-Day Hands-on Online Workshop: Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio Bootcamp
2025-05-29 · 14:00
2 Days Hands-On Online Workshop: Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio Bootcamp Date: 29-30 May 2025, 9 AM to 5 PM Central Time Level: Beginners/Intermediate Registration Link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hands-on-azure-ai-foundry-and-copilot-studio-bootcamp-tickets-1267311596099?aff=oddtdtcreator Who Should Attend? This hands-on workshop is open to developers, senior software engineers, IT pros, architects, IT managers, citizen developers, technology product managers, IT leaders, enterprise architects, chief analytics officers, chief information officers, chief technology officers, and decision-makers interested in learning how AI Agents and Generative AI can help infuse artificial intelligence into next-generation apps and agents. Experience with C#, Python, or JavaScript is helpful but not required. You don't need prior knowledge of AI either. Although this isn't a data & analytics-focused workshop, data scientists, data stewards, and technically-minded data protection officers will also find it very valuable Description: With ChatGPT and other large language models, generative AI has captured the attention of global consumers, enterprises, and C-suite executives. AI has a significant role in the enterprise space and is evolving rapidly. Without understanding the concepts behind these advanced technologies, developers and administrators might find it challenging to assess the true impact of emerging tools and solutions. An AI agent is a powerful companion capable of managing a variety of interactions and tasks—from handling complex conversations to autonomously deciding the best actions based on instructions and context. Agents coordinate language models along with instructions, context, knowledge sources, topics, actions, inputs, and triggers to achieve your desired outcomes. Copilot Studio is a graphical, low-code tool designed for creating agents, including building automations with Power Automate and extending Microsoft 365 Copilot with your own enterprise data and scenarios. One standout feature of Copilot Studio is its ability to connect to other data sources through either prebuilt or custom plugins, as well as integration with Azure AI Foundry. This flexibility allows users to easily build sophisticated logic, ensuring that agent experiences are both powerful and intuitive. Azure AI Foundry is a unified AI platform that includes the Azure AI Foundry portal (formerly Azure AI Studio) and the Azure AI Foundry SDK—a unified SDK featuring pre-built app templates. This SDK gives developers easy access to popular models through a single interface, simplifies the integration of Azure AI into applications, and helps evaluate, debug, and improve application quality and safety throughout development, testing, and production. In this two-day virtual hands-on workshop, Microsoft AI and Business Applications MVP and Microsoft Certified Trainer, Prashant G Bhoyar, will cover these topics in detail:
By the end of the workshop, you'll have practical experience building next-generation multimodal applications, Custom Copilots, and AI Agents using Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry. Workshop Resources: Access to Copilot Studio, Azure, and Azure OpenAI services (valued at USD 500) will be provided for hands-on labs, allowing you to build enterprise-grade multimodal applications and agents. However, you're encouraged to use your own Copilot Studio and Azure subscriptions if available. Attendee Workstation Requirements: You must bring your own computer (Windows or Mac) with:
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2-Day Hands-on Online Workshop: Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio Bootcamp
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AI and Deep Learning for Enterprise #22
2025-03-11 · 19:00
Join us at Civo Tech Junction on March 11th for an evening of talks about applied AI. As ever we'll be hosting an evening of talks, food, and conversation with ML and AI industry pros. Please note you will be unable to enter the venue before 6.30pm. RSVPs will close 24 hours before the event, you may be unable to register after this time but you can still watch online. If you can't join us in person you can watch remotely via our YouTube channel. Agenda 06:30pm - Doors open, food and drink served 07:00pm - Welcome 07:05pm - Lu Wilson. TLDraw "Beyond chat: Bringing models to the canvas" Whenever a new technology appears, our first instinct as developers is to offer "text" as the primary method of interaction. This has happened throughout computing history, with the computer terminal, with early smartphones, and now it's happening again with AI. At tldraw, we’ve been working on moving AI interaction away from the chat-based interface, towards a richer canvas environment. It hasn't been easy! I'll show you all the challenges we've faced, and how we're currently overcoming them. Some of the solutions have been surprising. 07:45pm - Break 08:00pm - Wendy Mak. Senior Data scientist at the Stepstone Group "SetFit for efficient few-shot classification" 08:40 - Sean Tracey, Bacalhau "Generating alt-text with LVMs for Bluesky with Bacalhau" alt-text makes the web more accessible for everyone, but not everybody takes the time to describe content they upload to social media platforms. So, we thought "Wouldn't it be great if we can use AI to automate that for people a touch?" And that's what we've done! Using Bacalhau.org and LLaVA (a Large Vision Model), we've built a Bluesky Bot which can generate alt-text for any image on Bluesky with just a single post! 09:00pm - Wrap up, drinks at Angel London Our hosts may require that we provide a list of all attendees, please ensure that you register with a name that matches your government issued ID or bank card: if you do not we cannot guarantee you entry to the building. Please RSVP for the event well in advance if you plan to attend in person and unRSVP if you can no longer attend as limited spaces are available. |
AI and Deep Learning for Enterprise #22
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4-Day Hands-on Workshop: Building Multimodal Applications, Custom Copilots, and AI Agents using GenAI (Azure OpenAI and ChatGPT) October 22-25, 2024 9:00AM – 5:00PM (Central) Registration Link : https://live360events.com/events/training-seminars/2024/oct22/home.aspx With ChatGPT, other large language models and generative AI have caught the attention of global consumers, enterprises, and C-suites. AI has a big role to play in the enterprise space and it is progressing rapidly. Without understanding the concepts behind these advanced technologies, developers and administrators will struggle to evaluate the potential impact of new tools and solutions. A multimodal GenAI application seamlessly generates high-quality content across text, images, video, and audio, all at once. Such applications would more accurately capture the multimodal nature of the world and human comprehension, seamlessly consolidate information from a wide range of sources, and enable strong immersion in human-AI interactions. This could transform the way humans interact with computers on various tasks, including assistive technology, custom learning tools, ambient computing, and content generation. Azure OpenAI Service provides REST API access to OpenAI's powerful language models including the GPT-3, GPT-4, Codex and Embeddings model series and DALL-E. These models can be easily adapted to your specific task including but not limited to content generation, summarization, semantic search, and natural language to code translation. Users can access the service through REST APIs, Python SDK, or our web-based interface in the Azure OpenAI Studio. In this 4-day virtual hands-on workshop, Microsoft AI and Business Applications MVP and Microsoft Certified Trainer Prashant G Bhoyar will cover the following topics in detail:
At the end of the workshop, attendees will have a working knowledge of how to build next-gen multimodal applications, Custom Copilots, and AI Agents with Azure OpenAI and Azure AI services. Access to Azure and Azure OpenAI services will be provided to follow the labs and create enterprise-grade multimodal applications. The labs will be a mixture of Python and C#. |
4-Day Hands-on Workshop: Building Multimodal Apps, Custom Copilots, & AI Agents
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Al and Orr Danon discuss a microprocessor which enables edge devices
2021-05-12 · 10:00
Send us a text Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at [[email protected]] and tell us why you should be next. Abstract Hosted by Al Martin, VP, IBM Expert Services Delivery, Making Data Simple provides the latest thinking on big data, A.I., and the implications for the enterprise from a range of experts. This week on Making Data Simple, we have Orr Danon CEO at Hailo Technologies. Hailo has developed a breakthrough deep learning microprocessor based on a novel architecture which enables edge devices to run sophisticated deep learning applications that could previously run only on the cloud. Orr has a decade of software and engineering experience from the Israel Defense Forces’ elite intelligence unit. Orr coordinated many of the unit’s largest and most complex interdisciplinary projects, ultimately earning the Israel Defense Award granted by Israel’s president, and the Creative Thinking Award, bestowed by the head of Israel’s military intelligence. Orr holds an M.Sc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Tel Aviv University and a B.Sc in Physics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Show Notes 4:28 – Is Edge a hardware solution? 11:45 – Where do you think the fastest growth in the Edge is going to be? 14:01 – What makes your AI chip different? 17:10 – Anything else in your secret sauce that makes you different? 18:28 – If I am a customer what do I do for proof of technology? And do your chips work together at the Edge? 21:35 – What about security? 22:50 – Tell us about the data? 26:40 – Where will you be in 5 years? Hailo website Connect with the Team Producer Kate Brown - LinkedIn. Producer Steve Templeton - LinkedIn. Host Al Martin - LinkedIn and Twitter. Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at [email protected] and tell us why you should be next. The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun. |
Making Data Simple |