#23 Paris Women in Machine Learning & Data Science: GANs, Reinforcement Learning, & Diplomacy
On the 22nd of January 2020, Scaleway welcomed us at “La Maison” for our 23rd meetup! It was a true pleasure to see both familiar and new faces, and to talk about machine learning and data science in a friendly atmosphere. Scaleway team did a great job hosting the event, we were incredibly impressed by their warm welcome and professionalism, and so grateful!
The introduction was made by our co-organiser, Natalie Cernecka:
1️⃣ The mission of WiMLDS is to support and promote women and gender minorities who are practicing, studying, or are interested in the fields of machine learning and data science.
2️⃣ The Paris WiMLDS meetup is featured in the first paper magazine of Actu IA — the famous media dedicated to machine learning and AI in France. If you hurry up, you can still order a copy here.
3️⃣ You can become a WiMLDS Paris speaker or recommend a speaker to the organizing team by answering to our call for speakers 🔍
4️⃣ Isabelle Hilali introduced DataCraft to our community. DataCraft is a club for Data Scientists willing to share knowledge and experience and will open soon in Paris (other locations to come). The next hackathon is on the 6th & 7th of February 2020 with INSEP, to work on high performance sports data. If you want to participate, or would like to learn more, reach out to Isabelle : isabelle.hilali@datacraft.paris 📩
5️⃣ You can apply to the Deutsche Telekom challenge. Did you pursue a Master’s thesis / PhD / Post-Doc in machine learning, cloud, IoT or on cybersecurity? Send an abstract of your work and win up to 5,5K€! 📊
6️⃣ Thanks to O’Reilly Media, we organized a 📚 raffle. Indeed, during the shooting of the TV show Le Bureau des Légendes, these books were used on set! O’Reilly Media kindly offered it to us and we naturally gave them away to our community members.
🎬 Here is the video of the meetup :
Olga Petrova, Machine Learning Engineer Scaleway kicked-off the meetup with a presentation about “Semi-Supervised Learning with GANs”. Here is the abstract of Olga’s presentation 🟣
Most of the recent breakthroughs in deep learning come at the cost of introducing larger models than ever before. Larger models require larger training sets, and supervised machine learning remains the go-to approach for many practical applications, which means that these training sets have to be labeled. Labelling data by human experts is expensive and time consuming, whereas unlabeled data is easy to gather for many domains of interest. These considerations underline the importance of semi-supervised learning: a machine learning approach that leverages both labeled data, and unlabelled data for the same (generally, supervised) task.One of the ways that this can be done is via the so-called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). GANs are unsupervised machine learning algorithms that can be trained to generate synthetic samples that come from the same distribution that the training data (e.g. a GAN trained on images of people's faces will learn to produce portraits of people who do not exist). Therefore, GANs are able to learn certain things about the distribution of the unlabeled data, which can then be combined with a smaller number of labeled samples to solve other, non-generative, tasks - e.g. image classification. I will present the current approaches in this area and go over an example semi-supervised GAN that I implemented in Pytorch.
Anaëlle Laurans, Applied Research Engineer — Machine Learning, followed up with a presentation about “Why Is It Important to Solve Games with AI?”.
The past few years, some incredible breakthrough was made through games like Alpha Go, to master the games of go; or OpenAI Five to beat the Dota 2 champions. This talk aimed to present the machine learning aspects of the AI and games research, which methods are used to create reliable interacting agent and the next frontier of this domain.
As always, we dedicated our third talk to another field. This time, Louisa Zanoun, Senior Science and Innovation Attachée at the British Embassy in Paris gave a talk about “Building Trust and Supporting Diplomacy through Science and Innovation”.
While it is widely acknowledged that science enables dialogue and cooperation between people, it also helps build trust between countries, thus playing an important part in international policy making and diplomacy. During this presentation, Louisa Zanoun explained how science and innovation can help improve international relations and presented some concrete examples of what she has done to foster closer dialogue between France and the UK.
🪐 We will be happy to see you again on the 16th of March 2020 for our next meetup (it has not been announced yet). In the meanwhile, feel free to join the next Paper Study Session on the 20th of February 2020, led by Betty Moreschini.
If you want to keep posted about our activities, you are welcome to
📑check our Google spreadsheet if you want to speak 📣, host 💙, help 🌠
🔗follow our Twitter account, Meetup page, Instagram or LinkedIn page
📍join our Slack channel for more discussions about machine learning, data science, and diversity in tech!
📩send an email to the Paris WiMLDS team to keep in touch >paris@wimlds.org
🎬 Follow our WiMLDS Paris Youtube channel
📸 WiMLDS has an Instagram account, a global LinkedIn page and a Facebook page!
🔥 Feel free to share your company or lab’s job positions for free on WiMLDS’ website.
