Understanding how AI can be leveraged to improve business outcomes
Making AI faster, easier, and safer
Speaker:
Rania Khalaf, Director of AI Platforms and Runtimes at IBM Research
When:
Tuesday, February 11, 2020, at 11:30am
(Lunch and refreshments: 11:30am, Talk: 12:00pm – 1:00pm)
Where:
Hariri Institute for Computing 111 Cummington Mall Seminar Room – Room 157
Abstract: Artificial intelligence is being infused into applications at an ever-increasing rate. The proliferation of machine learning models in production has surfaced the need to bridge between the worlds of machine learning and software engineering in order to scale these deployments in a fast, safe and repeatable way. Finally, it is important to consider the applications that these models are deployed within and the context that brings to improving business outcomes effectively through ML. In this talk, we will talk about key challenges of deploying AI in production and using it to improve business outcomes while highlighting some of the work we are doing at IBM Research AI to address this gap.
Bio: Rania Khalaf is the Director of AI Platforms and Runtimes at IBM Research AI where she leads teams pushing the envelope in AI platforms to make creating AI models and applications easy, fast, and safe for data scientists and developers. Her multi-disciplinary teams tackle key problems at the intersection of core AI, distributed systems, human-computer interaction, and cloud computing. Their recent projects include the Deep Learning capabilities in IBM Watson Studio, core features in IBM OpenScale, AI Fairness 360, and IBM’s Learn and Play AI games. Prior to this role, Rania was Director of Cloud Platform, Programming Models and Runtimes where her teams’ work resulted in Apache OpenWhisk and IBM Cloud Functions, Swift@IBM, API Harmony and Amalgam8 (now Istio). Before that, she led efforts on Machine Learning in Business Process and Case Management and made foundational contributions to SOA and Web standards, earning awards including IBM’s Extraordinary Research Accomplishment. Rania serves on the Advisory Board of the Hariri Institute for Computing at Boston University. She has received several Outstanding Technical Innovation awards for major impact on the field of computer science and is a finalist for the 2019 MassTLC CTO of the Year award. She has lived in 8 countries, spent a summer in India teaching kids to code, and holds a Ph.D. with honors from the University of Stuttgart and a Masters and Bachelors in EECS from MIT.
About the Collaboratory:
A partnership between Red Hat and Boston University, the Red Hat Collaboratory connects BU faculty and students with industry practitioners working in open-source software communities. Red Had Collaboratory is an initiative of the Hariri Institute for Computing that aims to advance research focused on emerging technologies in a number of areas including operating systems, cloud computing services, machine learning and automation, and big data platforms.