Machine Learning Prague 2023

Jon McLoone is central to driving the company's technical business strategy and leading the consulting solutions team. With over 30 years of experience working with Wolfram Technologies, Jon has helped in directing software development, system design, technical marketing, corporate policy, business strategies and much more. Jon gives regular keynote appearances and media interviews on topics such as the Future of AI, Enterprise Computation Strategies and Education Reform, across multiple fields including healthcare, fintech and data science. He holds a degree in mathematics from the University of Durham. Jon is also Co-founder and Director of Development for computerbasedmath.org, an organisation dedicated to fundamental reform of maths education and the introduction of computational thinking. 

Marek Rosa is the founder and CEO of GoodAI, a general artificial intelligence R&D company, and Keen Software House, an independent game development studio, started in 2010, and best known for its best-seller Space Engineers (nearing 5 million copies sold).
Marek has been interested in game development and artificial intelligence since childhood. He started his career as a programmer and later transitioned to a leadership role. After the success of Keen Software House titles, Marek was able to fund GoodAI in 2014 with a $10 Million personal investment.
Both companies now have over 100 engineers, researchers, artists, and game developers.
Marek's primary focus is the development of Space Engineers, VRAGE3 engine, AI Game, and Memetic Badger.
GoodAI's mission is to develop AGI - as fast as possible - to help humanity and understand the universe. One of the commercial stepping stones is the "AI game," which features LLM-driven NPCs grounded in the game world with developing personalities and long-term memory. GoodAI also works on autonomous agents that can self-improve and solve any task that a human can.

Olivier Koch is the Director of AI at Onfido, an online identity verification company. With his team, he builds new computer vision and machine learning techniques for fraud detection at a global scale, with a focus on performance and fairness. Prior to that, Olivier led the machine learning team for product recommendation at Criteo, where he led a major transformation of the Criteo engine using auto-encoders at the billion-user scale. He also led the computer vision team at Thales Optronics, building new algorithms for the French Rafale aircraft. Olivier holds a PhD in computer science from MIT and an engineering degree from ENSTA (Paris, France). His work has been published at international conferences such as ICCV, IJFR, ICRA and ICCV.

Mehrnoosh Sameki is a principal product lead at Microsoft, responsible for leading the product efforts on machine learning interpretability and fairness within the Open Source and Azure Machine Learning platform. She has cofounded Error Analysis, Fairlearn and Responsible AI Toolbox and has been a contributor to the InterpretML offering. She earned her PhD degree in computer science at Boston University, where she currently serves as an adjunct assistant professor, offering courses in responsible AI.

Uri Rosenberg is the specialist technical manager of AI & ML services within enterprise support at Amazon Web Services (AWS) EMEA. Uri works to empower enterprise customers on all things ML: from underwater computer vision models that monitor fish to training models on satellite images in space; from optimizing costs to strategic discussions on deep learning and ethics. Uri brings his extensive experience to drive success of customers at all stages of ML adoption. Before AWS, Uri led the ML projects at at&t innovation center in Israel, working on deep learning models with extreme security and privacy constraints. Uri is also an AWS certified Lead Machine learning subject matter expert and holds an MsC. in computer science from Tel-Aviv Academic college, where his research focused on large scale deep learning models.

Alex Athorne is a Research Engineer at Seldon, where he works on open-source libraries for explainability and drift detection. He studied mathematics at Warwick and went on to do a PhD at Imperial College London in dynamical systems. He's passionate about open-source development and writing about his experiences in ML.

Dr. Lars Ruddigkeit is an Account Technical Strategist at Microsoft, where he works on digital sovereignty questions with governments like the state of Switzerland. He is also an AI Speaker for Executive Briefings in Redmond, where he inspires C-Level board members to achieve more with Artificial Intelligence and take ownership of Responsible AI. He co-authored the whitepaper “Security Implications of ChatGPT” with the Cloud Security Alliance and is a global security expert in various working groups, including their Artificial Intelligence one. He holds a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Bern and an MBA from the Swiss Business School.

Martina Bekrova is a ML Team Lead in Melown Technologies. Her background is in mathematics, she studied Mathematical modelling in physics at Charles university in Prague. But shortly after graduation she found her passion for machine learning. In Melown Technologies she is responsible for ML Team which is applying (not only) machine learning techniques in context of 3D city reconstruction from images and point clouds in order to make the 3D city meshes a little bit smarter every day.

A senior data scientist at Productboard, Martin focuses on applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to help companies process, analyze, and make sense of customer feedback. He is passionate about taking business problems and developing and deploying models that solve the underlying customer needs. In addition to NLP, Martin’s experience spans network security and customer churn, and he has a Master’s degree in Applied Mathematics from FNSPE CTU.

Alexander Hagerf has over 10 years of experience in software development, having worked in many various industries e.g. retail, banking, media, and government. For the last 6 years, he's been working as a data engineer in Prague, Czech Republic. After working in GoodData & Jumpshot (Avast) he is currently the ML Engineering Lead in Emplifi working with both MLOps and Data engineering. He has talked at several meetups/conferences both in Stockholm and in Prague (e.g. Hadoop User Group, Avast Data summit) Education: MSc in Engineering Physics at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), thesis in ML - Statistical Relational Learning.

Fabian Kovac is a 30-year-old Research Assistant at the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences in Austria with a strong focus on Reinforcement Learning as well as sensor data and time series analysis. He finished his bachelor’s degree with distinction in Data Science & Business Analytics at the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences in 2022 and after finishing his master’s degree, Fabian is pursuing a PhD to further work towards his dream to leave his footprints in the world.

Before starting his research career, he had a diverse background in both professional sports playing American football as well as software engineering, having worked as a Full-Stack Developer with a strong backend focus at an international company for nearly 10 years, where he also had the opportunity to lead a small software development team and to manage data-driven projects.

My name is Piotr Skalski and I am a Computer Vision Engineer with over 5 years of experience in the field. My primary focus in my work is on detection, segmentation, and tracking, but my passion for sports is what truly sets me apart. I am always looking for ways to connect sports and computer vision, and I am constantly exploring new and innovative ways to use technology to enhance sports analysis. As an active open-source contributor, I have created several repositories that have collectively gathered around 4k GitHub stars. You can find my contributions in top computer vision repositories, and I am always looking for new ways to contribute and make a positive impact in the community.

Aimira Baitieva obtained her degree in Computer Science at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague. During her studies, she was working at the Multi-robot Systems group at CTU. She currently works as a research engineer at Valeo, focusing on machine learning and computer vision. She is part of the team which specializes in practical applications for the automotive industry. Current projects involve creating an automated visual inspection system on production lines and usage of lidar detection to secure workstations.

Foad Vafaei has worked at a number of leading software companies, including Oracle, SAP, Nuance, Microsoft, and JetBrains. Foad has a BS in Electrical Engineering and a BA in Economics from the University of Massachusetts in the US. He is currently working with a stealth-mode startup in the edge Machine Learning space.

Michal is the head of research & development in the field of data analytics. He graduated from the University of Economics in Prague, Faculty of Informatics and Statistics. His research interests include data analysis, Bayesian statistics, and time series modeling.

Michal Kubišta is a passionate data scientist who is keen on process optimization and driving ethical AI practices. As the Head of Data Science at Dataclair, he leads the Data Science Guild, a group dedicated to cross-team knowledge sharing and collaboration. He is currently focused on optimizing internal processes in O2 and streamlining the customer experience. Prior to joining Dataclair, Michal worked as a data scientist in the FMCG industry, where he concentrated on developing data-driven solutions for retailers’ pricing, loyalty, and assortment operations. He holds a Master's degree in Economic theory and modeling from the Institute of Economic Studies at Charles University.

Karel Šimánek is a co-founder of BigHub, a technology company that's making waves with its innovative AI solutions. Karel attended the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering at the Czech Technical University, where he also met his future business partner, Tomáš Hubínek. Before founding BigHub in 2017, Šimánek worked for several consulting and banking firms, where he honed his skills in business strategy and technology implementation.

Karel is passionate about staying up-to-date with the latest trends in AI and technology and is committed to making a positive impact on society through his work. That is also why he is an active member of the data community, lecturing, organizing DATA mesh meetups, and hosting the Data Talk podcast.

Matej is a graduate student at FIT CTU and a Machine Learning Engineer at Meteopress. He has experience with generative deep learning for various tasks, including image inpainting and time-series predictions using generative adversarial networks.

Aisling O’Sullivan is a Senior Data Scientist at O2 AICentre/Dataclair where she uses machine learning to help accelerate medical research. She has worked with pharmaceutical companies to help discover novel targets for cancer immunotherapy and other applications. She previously received her PhD in Computational Neuroscience from Trinity College Dublin where she used machine learning models to understand how the brain processes speech and language. She also spent time as a visiting PhD researcher at the University of Rochester, USA and received her degree and master’s in Biomedical Engineering from Trinity College Dublin.

Michal Marusan is a senior cloud solution architect at Microsoft, focusing on Data & AI services, responsible for adoption and design of solutions and projects for the enterprise customers starting AI & ML workloads on Azure. He drove adoption of Azure ML and related AI services in various industries - Telco, Banking, Gaming, Retail.

Michal Štefánik is a senior language specialist in the NLP team at Gauss Algorithmic and a researcher at Masaryk University. Throughout the last six years in NLP, he led the deployment of Attention-based models to numerous NLP applications, ranging from Named Entity Recognition to Machine Translation.
Michal conducts research on enhancing the robustness of large language models, including generalization to unseen tasks. He is also a founder of the students' Transformers Club, whose members received international prizes, including first place in Meta's NAACL DADC competition.

Specialist in natural language processing, graduate of applied mathematics and stochastic methods. Recreational climber.

Senior data scientist at Kiwi.com where he focuses on mathematical theory to address travel search-related problems with machine learning. In the past he graduated from Paris Cité University, France, with a PhD in probability and statistics for numerical simulators. He also has experience with applying machine learning in the fields of energy - reliability in nuclear plants - and pharmaceutical industry - identification of key features in cancer drug development. On a much lighter note, he is a huge fan of indie/punk music and loves cooking.

ML Engineer at Kiwi.com working on predictive models and their technical implementation in production environment. She has a Master's degree in Economics from Charles University in Prague. She has worked in data teams her entire career, first working for the Ministry of Health and then a pharmaceutical company, afterwards starting full-time at an energy company in Prague and then moving to the Netherlands to work for a commodity trading company. She has experience with delivering data science and machine learning solutions in all those fields. Despite the fact that they might seem unrelated, data is what connects them all. In her personal life, she loves science, sci-fi, martial arts, yoga, hiking, and, during summers, wild swimming.

Martin Plajner is the Director of the Research and Development department in the consultancy company Logio. This department's goal is to keep the company at the technological edge and to provide new methods and methodology. This is done by seeking novel approaches, prototyping, and defining new products. An inseparable part of the R&D team are trainees; students, who represent the company's future. Consequently, he desires to preserve his link to academia and is a junior researcher at the Institute of Information Theory and Automation (UTIA) in the field of decisions making theory with mathematical modeling background from Ph.D. studies and the Czech Technical University. These two parts provide an opportunity to combine the business and the academic world and to challenge both theoretical concepts as well as established practices.

Theodor Petřík is an R&D consultant in the company Logio. He has worked in the company as a trainee over most of his university studies and then naturally became a full-time consultant. Theodor is also a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Economic Studies (IES) at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University where he is researching how companies should conduct strategic operations planning to utilize their scarce resources in the most efficient way. The knowledge gained from theoretical research can be applied to real-world applications and the experience obtained from the real-world projects provides in return a unique perspective on theoretical concepts.

Petr is a mathematician and senior researcher at FIT CTU. Petr is involved in many ML projects and is focused on merging ML with known or unknown physics and dynamics.

Radovan Kavicky joined DataCamp among its first employees (historically 1st Data Science Instructor from CEE region & is still historically the only person worldwide who have made successful transition from regular student to DataCamp instructor and employee after being #1 worldwide @ DataCamp platform for a year, back in 2017).

Radovan is Data Science Polyglot (R, Python, Julia ++more) and Data Science Veteran with 11+ years of experience in Data Science and Applied AI/ML Consulting & extensive knowledge in the area (Data Science consulting, education & community building with successful cooperation together with global leaders within our industry, like f.e. H2O.ai, Anaconda or Tableau). Radovan is also co-founder of Slovak.AI (Slovak Research Center for Artificial Intelligence), member of AIslovakIA (National platform for the AI development in Slovakia) and  various international professional societies within Data Science & AI/ML industry, like f.e. IEEE Computer Society, CLAIRE (Confederation of Laboratories for Artificial Intelligence Research in Europe), European AI Alliance (European Commission/Futurium), TAILOR network (Trustworthy AI - Integrating Learning, Optimisation and Reasoning), UDSC (United Data Science Communities), PyData Global Network, Global Tableau #DataLeader network & The Python Software Foundation (PSF).

Radovan is Founder of PyData Slovakia/Bratislava (#PyDataSK #PyDataBA), R <- Slovakia (#RSlovakia), Julia Users Group Slovakia (#JUGSlovakia) & SK/CZ Tableau User Group (#skczTUG) that you are all welcome to join.

Jirka is a graduate student and researcher at FIT CTU. Currently, he is involved primarily in machine learning for spatiotemporal predictions, but he also has previous experience in augmented/virtual reality and web development.

Jozef was the first data engineer at STRV and is now leading data science team. Previously long-time data analyst in many fields including forensic, supply chain and e-commerce. He got pissed by the traditional tech stack and turned into analytics engineer thanks to dbt. He likes good filter coffee, open source projects, and filmography.

Matej is a Data Scientist at Meteopress and a Ph.D. student at FIT CTU. Specializing in spatiotemporal prediction and physics-informed deep learning. Nature lover and mountaineer.

Pavel is a data and analytics engineer at STRV who turns great coffee into business value. He enjoys problem solving and finding efficient solutions to help push the projects forward. He is a fan of unix and FOSS and enjoys spending his time in the command line.

Aneta Havlinova is currently a data scientist/Python developer in Workday, contributing to the development of People Analytics, an application providing insights into HR data in areas such as diversity, attrition, skills, and more. She gained experience in HR analytics also in public sector, namely during her internship for the Council of the European Union in Brussels. Previously, she worked as a data scientist in MSD, where she used her knowledge for example to help lab scientists with biological processes modelling, or to provide oncology marketing teams with insights based on financial data. She has a master’s degree from the Institute of Economic Studies at Charles University in Prague.

Martin Korytak is a data scientist and Python developer at Workday. He is one of the key contributors to its proprietary engine which provides enthralling insights into HR data in a narrative form. Prior to joining Workday, Martin was an IBM Great Minds intern at IBM Research in Zurich working on accelerated inference of tree-based models capable of handling large-scale data sets. He holds an M.Sc. degree in data science with specialization in artificial intelligence from Czech Technical University in Prague. His interests span algorithms, neural networks and interpretability of machine learning algorithms. He is also a member of the local AI community and an enthusiastic teacher of Python programming language.

ML and Data Engineering specialist focusing on operational architectures of ML solutions - enabling their smooth transition from research to production through appropriate ML lifecycle management. Previously leading research in ML pipeline formalization at Oracle AI Apps. Co-author of the ForML framework.

Currently Chief Data Officer at VietcomBank with a special interest in products with ML components, the architectures to support these, and organizational separation of concerns to deliver them.  Previously a data scientist at Google, Kaggle competitions master, and co-author of the ForML framework.