Transformers are in high demand, particularly in industries like BFSI and healthcare, for language processing, understanding, classification, generation and translation. The parameter counts for models like GPT, that are fast becoming the norm in the world of NLP, are mind-boggling, and the cost involved in training and deploying even more so. If the vast potential for LLMs is to extend beyond the wealthiest companies and research institutions on the planet, then there is a need to evaluate how to lower the barriers of entry for experimentation and research on models like GPT. There's also a need to discuss the extent to which bigger is better, in the field of practical and commercial NLP.
This panel will look at the state of play of how enterprises are using large language models today, what their plans are for future research in NLP, and how hardware & systems builders and organizations like HuggingFace can help bring state-of-the-art performance into production in smaller, more resource-constrained enterprises and labs.
Phil Brown
Phil leads Graphcore’s efforts to build large scale AI/ML processing capability using Graphcore unique Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) and IPU-Fabric and Streaming Memory technology. Previously he has held a number of different roles at Graphcore including Director of Applications, leading development of Graphcore’s flagship AL/ML models, and Director of Field Engineering, which acts as the focal point for technical engagements with our customers. Prior to joining Graphcore, Phil worked for Cray Inc. in a number of roles, including leading their engagement with the weather forecasting and climate research customers worldwide and as a technical architect. Phil holds a PhD in Computational Chemistry from the University of Bristol.
Selcuk Kopru
Selcuk Kopru is Head of ML & NLP at eBay and is an experienced AI leader with proven expertise in creating and deploying cutting edge NLP and AI technologies and systems. He is experienced in developing scalable Machine Learning solutions to solve big data problems that involve text and multimodal data. He is also skilled in Python, Java, C++, Machine Translation and Pattern Recognition. Selcuk is also a strong research professional with a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in NLP in Computer Science from Middle East Technical University.
Jeff Boudier
Jeff Boudier is a product director at Hugging Face, creator of Transformers, the leading open-source NLP library. Previously Jeff was a co-founder of Stupeflix, acquired by GoPro, where he served as director of Product Management, Product Marketing, Business Development and Corporate Development.
Morteza Noshad
Morteza Noshad is a senior ML/NLP scientist at Vida health. He is skilled at designing large scale NLP models for different healthcare applications such as automated clinical documentation, symptom detection and question answering. Morteza was a research scientist at Stanford University focusing on graph neural networks for clinical decision support systems where he received the SAGE Scientist Award for his research. Morteza received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Michigan where he contributed to the theory of information bottleneck in deep learning.
