Diving Deep Into Data Science at ACTIVATE 2019

AI, machine learning, and data science power personalization for user experiences across government, banking, e-commerce, and more. This year at ACTIVATE, we’ve gathered top data scientists and engineers from companies like Airbnb, Hautelook, Target, and The Home Depot to discuss topics such as visual search, chatbots, and question answering. 

We’ve highlighted some of the roundtables, panels, and talks from the Data Science track below. Register before July 26 and save $400 on your ACTIVATE pass. 

The Home Depot: Overcoming the Challenges of Query Autocomplete

The foundation for providing a great user experience starts with understanding user intent. Stephan Hanek and Rongkai Zhao, engineers from The Home Depot, will share how they overcame several challenges with customer behavior data to improve their query autocomplete service, including phonetic, semantic, and order-insensitive deduplication of terms, normalization of noisy data in search terms, and more. Read up on query autocomplete before ACTIVATE, and don’t miss their session on September 11th at 11:35am.

Airbnb: Tackling a “Small Data” Search Challenge at Airbnb Experiences

Learn how Airbnb approached the challenge of developing robust search for one of their early-stage products, Airbnb Experiences. Liang Wu, a Machine Learning Data Scientist, will explain how the team solved this problem with causal inference. Attendees will learn how to approach ecommerce search for an early-stage product, and understand the concept of causal inference and how to design natural experiments to remove biases in search log data. Mark your calendars now for Liang’s session on September 11th at 4:10pm.

Target: Deep Learning and Customized Solr Components to Boost Search Relevancy

Target relies on a combination of deep learning models and custom Solr components to deliver highly accurate search results at scale. Learn how their state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms power e-commerce search and how you can customize your Solr to blend multiple machine learning signals at a large scale. Be sure to attend this session on September 12th at 2:20pm. 

Explore the full ACTIVATE agenda here and be sure to register by July 26 to save $400 on your pass.