[vc_row 0=""][vc_column 0=""][vc_column_text 0=""]On October 19th, 2017, Sentiance welcomed ninety data scientists to our Antwerp office for a Data Science Expert meetup organized by DSGhent. Three experts in the field, Yves Peirsman, an expert at NLP Town and leader of the Belgian NLP meetup group, Fréderic Godin, Ph.D. researcher Deep Learning at Ghent University (IDLab), and Bertrand Fontaine, VP Data Science at Sentiance, led in-depth discussions of their respective work.
A deep dive in deep learning for NLP from Yves Peirsman preceded Frederic Godin's work on dealing with vanishing gradients in recurrent neural networks. Bertrand Fontaine provided an example of how these concepts are applied in production by walking through how Sentiance used deep learning to build a driver/passenger detection algorithm.
Watch the full talks here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row 0=""][vc_column 0=""][vc_column_text 0=""]We at Sentiance are always amazed by the amount of talent in this field in Belgium. We’re excited to use different opportunities, such as meetups, to gather the brightest minds to teach, learn and brainstorm and are proud to contribute to the data science community.
Let's see what the speakers and organizers had to say about the expert talks.
"Yves' talk was clear and spot-on from an NLP perspective, i.e. deep learning didn't solve NLP. For example, we still see a lot of models generating semantically incorrect sentences. On the other hand, deep learning has opened up a lot of possibilities, which Yves also discussed. “ said Frederik, “Bertrand's talk was really interesting because we got to see 'under the hood' of Sentiance's technology. The presentation was about tech all the way down, which I really appreciate. Many companies hide this side while pouring buzzwords, which wasn't the case here. It was really cool that Sentiance wanted to host this and get us beer and pizza - there was a good positive vibe all around and the networking time was a lot of fun."
"It was a really inspiring night. The talks were great and I met a lot of really technical people afterward. I'm happy the public seemed to like my presentation because it's always a bit risky making a presentation this technical. Fréderic's presentation was one of the clearest oversights of more advanced RNN-architectures that I've seen. It continued perfectly from my presentation before, covering the more accepted RNN concepts such as attention. With Bertrand, it was really interesting to see the advanced models and architecture Sentiance uses to classify human behavior at various levels. I haven't heard of many companies who can do that in that sense." – said Yves.
DSGhent expressed "We had a great time all-round! We wanted to organize an expert talks evening, focusing on advanced topics and use-cases. Since Sentiance wanted the same, we decided to combine our efforts, which paid off. The meetup was fully booked immediately after the announcement. Yves had a beautiful summary of what deep learning has done (and has yet to do) in NLP. Fréderic built on this topic, showing techniques that allow training deeper RNNs with fewer parameters and better results. Bertrand from Sentiance presented an advanced use-case combining multiple techniques in great detail, which most companies can be reluctant to do. It was great seeing all of these passionate people discuss data science afterward. Thanks, Sentiance for hosting this, we hope to see you again in the community!"[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row 0=""][vc_column 0=""][vc_gallery interval="3" images="8985,8986,8987,8988,8989,8990,8991" img_size="large"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row 0=""][vc_column 0=""][vc_column_text 0=""]
Every day at Sentiance is challenging and rewarding! Our team is growing fast and we are looking for talented people who want to make an impact working on game-changing technologies.
Be one of the change-makers and join our team!
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