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2021 Instagram Workshop on Recommendation Systems At Scale
About this event
Welcome to the 2021 Instagram Workshop on Recommendation Systems at Scale
Production recommendation systems in large social and commerce platforms introduce complex and unprecedented challenges. The Instagram Workshop on Recommendation Systems At Scale aims to bring together leading researchers and practitioners in related fields to share knowledge and explore research collaboration opportunities between academia and industry.
The 2021 workshop will be held virtually on Thursday, September 23rd, and we invite you to RSVP and attend through this event website.
If you'd like to submit questions for our speakers during the panel discussion ahead of the workshop, please do so through this form.
This event will not be recorded. No portion of this presentation may be reproduced, performed, displayed, or distributed without authorization.
Anoop Deoras is a group applied research manager at AWS, AI where he runs the applied science org for AI vertical services which includes three key areas: Personalization, Time Series Forecasting & Demand Planning and Anomaly Detection in Time Series. Anoop obtained his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2011 and he specializes in time series models such as language models, temporal point processes and user personalization. Prior to joining AWS, Anoop spent numerous years at Netflix where he architected, designed and built deep learning based ML solutions for Netflix’s flagship products – tv/movie recommendation, home page construction and product search.
Chris Wiggins
The New York Times
Chris Wiggins is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and the Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times. At Columbia he is a founding member of the executive committee of the Data Science Institute, and of the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics as well as the Department of Systems Biology, and is affiliated faculty in Statistics.He is a co-founder and co-organizer of hackNY, a nonprofit which since 2010 has organized once a semester student hackathons and the hackNY Fellows Program, a structured summer internship at NYC startups.Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia he was a Courant Instructor at NYU (1998-2001) and earned his PhD at Princeton University (1993-1998) in theoretical physics. He is currently writing a book on the history and ethics of data with Professor Matt Jones (Columbia) forthcoming from W. W. Norton & Company in 2021. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and is a recipient of Columbia's Avanessians Diversity Award.Pronouns: he/him.
Diane Hu
Etsy
Diane Hu currently leads the applied machine learning department at Etsy, focusing on ML-driven technology and applications in Search, Recommendations, Ads, Computer Vision, and Trust & Safety. She was previously a Staff Scientist at Etsy after earning her Ph.D. in machine learning and music from University of California San Diego.
Jonathan J Hunt
Twitter Cortex Applied Research
Jonathan J Hunt (known as jj) is a Staff Scientist at Twitter Cortex Applied Research (CAR) - Recommender Systems. At Twitter he works on a variety of recommender systems problems including push notifications, long-term value and advertising and collaborates closely with several product teams to put research into practice. Prior to Twitter, jj researched Deep Reinforcement Learning and other topics at DeepMind and Brain Corporation. Prior to discovering machine learning, he spent time as an unsuccessful neuroscientist and physicist, and holds a PhD from the University of Queensland (Australia) and a BSc Hons from Massey University (New Zealand) from those attempts.
Thomas Bredillet
Instagram
I'm an AI researcher currently leading machine learning at Instagram. I sometimes go by 'tnb'. Most of my professional career has been implementing a range of machine learning algorithms to improve a bottom line, which I've done at Kantar (ads), Google (ads) and Facebook (recommender systems). I am also involved with various research organizations, conferences and I love to talk about the latest ML trend of the moment!
Shujian Bu
Instagram
I am an Engineering Manager on the Instagram Reels Recommendation team, where I lead a group of research scientists and machine learning engineers. During my time at Facebook, I have focused on variety of ranking and recommendation problems.
Xiuyan Ni
Instagram
I am a Research Scientist on the Instagram Reels Recommendation team. During my time at Facebook, I have been working on applying machine learning techniques to various ranking problems.
Yinglong Xia
Facebook
Yinglong Xia is an Applied Research Scientist in Facebook AI, where he focuses on advanced machine learning technology for recommendation systems, especially those based on graph data, through collaboration with teams from both AI and products. Prior to that, he was a chief architect of AI platforms in Futurewei Technologies, and a technical lead at IBM Research on graph technology. He is an associate editor for IEEE trans. on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) and IEEE trans. on Big Data (TBD), and served as a general co-chair of IEEE HiPC’19, a vice co-chair of IEEE BigData’19, a SPC/PC of IJCAI’21, CIKM’21, KDD’21, AAAI’21, etc.
I am an Engineering Manager at Facebook on the Instagram Feed Ranking team. Before Facebook, I worked at AWS on machine learning services such as Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Kendra. I did my Ph.D. at the University of Washington and spent several years commercializing my research through a hardware startup. I hold 9 US patents and published more than 80 peer-reviewed academic papers. Interests: Recommendation systems, natural language processing, deep generative models. Check out Ran's Facebook Research profile to learn more.
Zhuoran Yu
Instagram
I am a machine learning engineer at Facebook on the Instagram Feed Ranking team. Before Facebook, I worked at Google AI on natural language understanding and its applications. I was fortunate to have Prof. Liang Huang advise me and lead me into computational linguistics in graduate school. Check out Zhuoran's Facebook Research profile to learn more.
Doria Xu
Facebook
I am a research program manager on the Research Operations and Academic Relations team at Facebook. I help the research teams map out academic engagements, such as corporate sponsorships and research collaborations. Acting as primary liaison between the research teams and the XFN partners, I ensure initiatives and programs are well scoped and executed. Currently, my areas of focus include Networking & Systems and Blockchain & Cryptoeconomics. Prior to joining Facebook, I managed interdisciplinary research projects and cross-sector partnerships at various universities and civic organizations across a broad range of areas including capital markets, urban redevelopment, and responsible investment. Most recently, I served as a program manager at the Stanford’s Investment Responsibility Stakeholder Relations office. I received my M.A. in economic development from Vanderbilt University and hold LL.M. in financial regulation from Georgetown University Law Center. Check out Doria's Facebook Research profile to learn more.
Jessica Birch
Meta
Jessie is a Research Events Producer on the Research Operations and Academic Relations (Marketing & Events) team at Facebook. She partners with research program managers and research scientists at Facebook to strategize and produce impactful events and programs for teams within the Facebook research community, specifically Facebook's Infrastructure, Privacy and Security, Systems and Networking, and Connectivity teams. Jessie graduated from University of Colorado at Boulder in May 2015 with a Bachelor of Arts in Communication and a State of Colorado Teaching License. Prior to joining Facebook in May 2018, Jessie worked as an AI and Research Programs Event Coordinator on assignment at Google (April 2017-May 2018), a Public Relations Account Coordinator at SHIFT Communications (May 2016-April 2017), and an Event Coordinator Intern at Human Movement Management (February 2014-September 2014).
Stephanie Greer
Meta
Stephanie is a Research Events Coordinator on the Research Operations and Academic Relations (Marketing & Events) team at Facebook. She just recently joined the team but is extremely excited to coordinate events under the research umbrella. She works closely with the research program managers and scientists to produce quality academic engagements for conferences and hosted events, both virtually and in person. Stephanie is a San Jose State Alumni, Go Spartans! She has a strong background in internal and external corporate events, with over 15 years of customer service and stakeholder experience. Her last positions were held at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google REWS where she worked on a wide variety of different corporate events.
Abhinav Khaitan
Instagram
I am an Engineering Manager in the Reels Ranking team. Specifically, I support our efforts to surface the most relevant Reels by building and leveraging cutting edge Content Signals and optimizing our Delivery Funnel. For more information, visit my Facebook Research profile: https://research.fb.com/people/khaitan-abhinav/.
Amit Nithianandan
Instagram
I am a Senior Engineering Manager on Instagram Shopping where I support teams focused on shopping content distribution throughout the Instagram ecosystem and delivery/infra. Prior to Instagram, I ran the Marketplace Search team, building this 0->1 product and prior to Facebook, I worked at a number of startups focused on search and recommendations especially in the local events and ecommerce space.
Ben Schulte
Instagram
I support Machine Learning, Product and Integrity teams bringing Instagram’s Feed & Stories surfaces to life. Check out Ben's Facebook Research profile to learn more.
Haotian Wu
Instagram
I support engineering teams that are responsible for Instagram Explore and Reels ranking and recommendations. Check out Haotian's Facebook Research profile to learn more.
Joe Pamer
Instagram
Joe Pamer is an Engineering Director at Instagram, where he serves as their Head of Infrastructure, Feed, and ML. Before joining Facebook to help lead their programming language efforts, he was instrumental in the design and development of the F#, TypeScript, and Swift programming languages, and has contributed to many other major developer technologies ranging from .NET to VS Code to Clang. He has spent the last several years focused on the intersection of ML and infrastructure at scale.
Li Li
Instagram
I am an Engineering Manager at Facebook on the Instagram Personalization Technology team. I support the effort of bringing in advanced ML technologies around content and people understanding to recommendation products.
Parth Vasa
Instagram
I lead the Shopping Engineering team on Instagram. Our vision is to reinvent e-commerce by building a personalized version of “Soho” for everyone on the planet. Before Shopping I worked on Discovery products in Instagram. And before Instagram I helped build the Search and AI teams at Bloomberg.
Radhika Kulkarni
Instagram
I am a software engineering manager at Instagram. I support an ML platform team focusing on improving ML dev experience and applying under the hood optimization across ML stack
Rui Li
Instagram
I support the Business Quality team at Instagram. Our team works on challenging problems in the ads ranking/recommendation systems. We design proper value functions and optimize for users outcomes. We enable delightful commercial experiences for Instagram users in order to sustainably grow advertising on Instagram.Prior to FB, I started my career in GE global research where I was a site PI leading the area of building imaging diagnostic solutions for breast cancer screening.
Sagar Chordia
Instagram
I currently lead Instagram Ads Value org which is responsible for IG ads revenue. My team invests in ranking, product and infra charters aimed at improving value to advertiser and improving user relevance. I was a founding member of IG ads in 2015 and have played crucial role in making IG ads multi-billion dollar business.
Shahin Sefati
Facebook
I am an engineering manager at Facebook AI. I support a team focusing on building and improving recommendation model understanding capabilities for Facebook products.
Shujian Bu
Instagram
I am an Engineering Manager on the Instagram Reels Recommendation team, where I lead a group of research scientists and machine learning engineers. During my time at Facebook, I have focused on variety of ranking and recommendation problems.
Xiuyan Ni
Instagram
I am a Research Scientist on the Instagram Reels Recommendation team. During my time at Facebook, I have been working on applying machine learning techniques to various ranking problems.
Yinglong Xia
Facebook
Yinglong Xia is an Applied Research Scientist in Facebook AI, where he focuses on advanced machine learning technology for recommendation systems, especially those based on graph data, through collaboration with teams from both AI and products. Prior to that, he was a chief architect of AI platforms in Futurewei Technologies, and a technical lead at IBM Research on graph technology. He is an associate editor for IEEE trans. on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) and IEEE trans. on Big Data (TBD), and served as a general co-chair of IEEE HiPC’19, a vice co-chair of IEEE BigData’19, a SPC/PC of IJCAI’21, CIKM’21, KDD’21, AAAI’21, etc.
