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SUMMARY:AI for Inclusive Finance - Alan Qi and Le Song
DTSTART:20171201T110000Z
DTEND:20171201T120000Z
UID:TALK96403@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Maria Lomeli
DESCRIPTION:Ant Financial is a data-driven technology company. The buildin
 g and applications of AI platforms are critical for making progress and cr
 eating innovations in the field of digital financial services. We have bui
 lt industry-leading AI platforms including large-scale machine learning/de
 ep learning\, search/recommendation/ads\, intelligent customer service and
  intelligent assistant as well as financial business analyses. We will giv
 e introductions as well as some technical details to those platforms and t
 heir applications in our financial life\, including risk control\, credit 
 and insurance.\n \nBio: Alan Qi is the Chief Data Scientist and Vice Presi
 dent at Ant Financial since 2014. Alan built the AI department at Ant Fina
 ncial and applied machine learning technologies to various business applic
 ations\, including but not limited to micro-loans\, intelligent recommenda
 tions\, and wealth management. For example\, he developed intelligent cust
 omer service systems which led to 94% self-service rate in 2015 and saved 
 ~$15 Million for Ant Financial in 2016. Before that he co-founded institut
 e of Data Science and Technologies (iDST) of Alibaba\, and built the param
 eter sever team and developed Alibaba's first large-scale machine learning
  platform in 2015. It is widely used at Alibaba (more than 100 systems) su
 ch as Singles' day recommendation system and search Ads (increasing revenu
 e $ >1Billion). This platform won the top technology prize from Alibaba in
  2015. Alan obtained his PhD from MIT and was tenured at Purdue University
  as associate professor in CS and Statistics. He is an associate editor of
  JMLR and served as area chair of ICML. He received the A. Richard Newton 
 Breakthrough Research Award\, and NSF Career award in 2011.\n \nBio: Le So
 ng is a Principle Engineer at Ant Financial AI Department\, and he is also
  an Associate Professor in the College of Computing\, and an Associate Dir
 ector of the Center for Machine Learning\, Georgia Institute of Technology
 . He developed the first large scale deep learning platform for graph lear
 ning and inference at Ant Financial with applications to finance problems 
 such as credit\, risk management\, micro-loans and insurance. Le received 
 his Ph.D. in Machine Learning from University of Sydney and NICTA in 2008\
 , and then conducted his post-doctoral research in the Department of Machi
 ne Learning\, Carnegie Mellon University\, between 2008 and 2011. His prin
 cipal research direction is machine learning\, especially nonlinear models
 \, such as kernel methods and deep learning\, and probabilistic graphical 
 models for large scale and complex problems\, arising from artificial inte
 lligence\, network analysis and other interdisciplinary domains. He is the
  recipient of the Recsys’16 Deep Learning Workshop Best Paper Award\, AI
 STATS'16 Best Student Paper Award\, IPDPS'15 Best Paper Award\, NSF CAREER
  Award’14\, NIPS’13 Outstanding Paper Award\, and ICML’10 Best Paper
  Award. He has also served as the area chair or senior program committee f
 or many leading machine learning and AI conferences such as ICML\, NIPS\, 
 AISTATS\, AAAI and IJCAI. He is also the action editor for JMLR\, and asso
 ciate editor for IEEE PAMI.\n \n \nCompany Profile: Ant Financial is a tec
 hnology company that brings inclusive financial services to the world. Ant
  Financial\, officially founded in October 2014\, originated from Alipay f
 ounded in 2004. With the mission of "bring the world equal opportunities"\
 , Ant Financial is dedicated to creating an open\, shared credit system an
 d financial services platform through technology innovations\, and to prov
 ide consumers and small businesses with safe and convenient inclusive fina
 ncial services globally.
LOCATION:CBL Seminar Room
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