Join us in this panel discussion to hear from ML practitioners on their journey to implementing Recommender Systems. We’ll discuss the most common challenges encountered when getting started, and best practices to address them. We’ll explore organizational dynamics, recommended tools, and how to align business requirements with technical capabilities. You’ll hear about approaches to phasing in Recommender Systems, starting small and progressively iterating on more sophisticated solutions.

We’ll provide an introduction to Monolith, a system tailored for online training. Our design has been driven by observations of our application workloads and production environment that reflects a marked departure from other recommendations systems. Our contributions are manifold: first, we crafted a collisionless embedding table with optimizations such as expirable embeddings and frequency filtering to reduce its memory footprint; second, we provide an production-ready online training architecture with high fault-tolerance; finally, we proved that system reliability could be traded-off for real-time learning. Monolith has successfully landed in the BytePlus Recommend product.

Slack, as a product, presents many opportunities for recommendation, where we can make suggestions to simplify the user experience and make it more delightful. Each one seems like a terrific use case for machine learning, but it isn’t realistic for us to create a bespoke solution for each. In the talk, we’ll dive into the Recommend API, a unified framework the team built over the years that allows us to quickly bootstrap new recommendation use cases. Behind the scenes, these recommenders reuse a common set of infrastructure for every part of the recommendation engine, such as data processing, model training, candidate generation, and monitoring. This has allowed us to deliver a number of different recommendation models across the product, driving improved customer experience in a variety of contexts.

In this talk, Drew will discuss the dbt Semantic Layer and explore some of the ways that Semantic Layers and Feature Stores can be leveraged together to power consistent and precise analytics and machine learning applications.

Discover how Vital powers its predictive, customer-facing, emergency department wait-time product with request-time input signals and how it solves its "cold-start" problem by building machine-learning feedback loops using Tecton.

A feature store can solve many problems, with various degrees of complexity. In this talk I'll go over our process to keep it simple, and the solutions we came up with.

Applied ML consists of ML algorithms at its core and engineering systems around it. For over a decade as an applied ML practitioner, I have built a number of such engineering systems to help unlock the full potential of ML in a variety of problem domains. This talk is about my learnings in building those systems and patterns that I've found to work well across applications.