This track addresses the major challenges faced when applying DS/ML/AI to corporate data with an emphasis on the common aspects data teams face: identifying the data you have, deciding how to organize and clean it, building the actual algorithmic models themselves, and ultimately, integrating the models into an application and scaling it into the organization’s IT systems.
Jordi Vitrià is a Full Professor the University of Barcelona (UB), which he joined in 2007, and where he teaches an introductory course on Algorithms and advanced courses on Data Science and Deep Learning. From April 2011 to January 2016 he served as UB'a Head of the Applied Mathematics and Analysis Department. He is now a member of the new Mathematics & Computer Science Department at UB. He is also the director of the Master's in Foundations of Data Science and co-director of the Big Data and Data Science Postgraduate course at UB.
From 1991 to 2006, he taught Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence in the Computer Science Department at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). He was also in charge of doctoral and master studies in that department until September 2007.
His research, when personal computers had 128KB of memory, was originally oriented towards digital image analysis and how to extract quantitative information from them, but soon evolved towards computer vision problems. After a postdoctoral year at the University of California at Berkeley in 1993, he focused on Bayesian methods for computer vision methods. Now, he is leading a research group working in deep learning, computer vision and machine learning. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and 8 international patents. He has directed 12 PhD theses in the area of machine learning and computer vision. He has been the leader of a large number of research projects at international and national level.
He has been always interested in connecting his academic work to the social environment, and since 1993 he has been involved in a large number of projects to transfer academic knowledge to industrial production, medical diagnoses and media applications. He is now director of the DataScience@UB group technology transfer group that is supported by the Generalitat de Catalunya (TECNIO Center). During the last years the DataScience@UB group has been actively collaborating with companies such as BBVA, IBM, TUV Rheinland, Telefonica, Vodafone, ICGC, Bodas.net, Given Imaging, correYvuela, Ajuntament de Barcelona, 7ideas, etc.
Santi Seguí is an Associate Professor at the University of Barcelona. He has an extensive scientific background in the fields of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. He obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2011 from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and since then he has spent several months abroad in top-ranked universities such as CMU and UofT. During his career, he has collaborated with several companies to tackle AI solutions for real-world problems. He is also Co-founder of DataBeersBCN and the head of the Data Science postgraduate course at the University of Barcelona.