BU Red Hat Collaboratory

Making AI faster, easier, and safer

Abstract

Artificial intelligence is being infused into applications at an ever increasing rate. The proliferation of machine learningmodels in production has surfaced the need to bridge between the worlds of machine learning and software engineeringin order to scale these deployments in a fast, safe and repeatable way. Finally, it is important to consider the applicationsthat these models are deployed within and the context that brings to improving business outcomes effectively throughML. In this talk, we will talk about key challenges of deploying AI in production and using it to improve businessoutcomes while highlighting some of the work we are doing at IBM Research AI to address this gap.

About the Speaker

Rania Khalaf is the Director of AI Platforms and Runtimes at IBM Research AI where she leads teams pushing theenvelope in AI platforms to make creating AI models and applications easy, fast, and safe for data scientists anddevelopers. Her multi-disciplinary teams tackle key problems at the intersection of core AI, distributed systems, humancomputer interaction and cloud computing. Their recent projects include the Deep Learning capabilities in IBM WatsonStudio, 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' workresulted in Apache OpenWhisk and IBM Cloud Functions, Swift@IBM, API Harmony and Amalgam8 (now Istio). Beforethat, she led efforts on Machine Learning in Business Process and Case Management and made foundational contributionsto 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 severalOutstanding Technical Innovation awards for major impact to the field of computer science and is a finalist for the 2019MassTLC CTO of the Year award. She has lived in 8 countries, spent a summer in India teaching kids to code, and holdsa PhD with honors from University of Stuttgart and a Masters and Bachelors in EECS from MIT.

About the CollaboratoryA par tnership between Red Hat and Boston University, the Red Hat Collaboratory connects BU faculty and studentswith industry practitioners working in open-source software communities. The Collaboratory aims to advance researchfocused on emerging technologies in a number of areas including operating systems, cloud computing services, machinelearning and automation, and big data platforms.

When 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm on Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Location Hariri Institute for Computing 111 Cummington Mall Seminar Room - Room 157