Silicon Valley
Past Presentations
Enabling Innovation at Uber Speed
Uber has been growing at a breakneck speed both in terms of business as well as in terms of people. Innovation and the speed of innovation is paramount to our success. At the same time, Uber’s mission is defined as “Transportation That Is As Reliable as Running Water”. How does Uber create...
Real-Time Data Analysis and ML for FraudPrevention
PayPal processes about a billion dollars of payment volume daily ($354bn in FY2016); complex decisions are made for each transaction or user action, to manage risk and compliance, while also ensuring good user experience. PayPal users can make payments immediately in 200 countries with the...
Machine Learning Through Streaming at Lyft
Uses of Machine Learning are pervasive in today’s world. From recommendations systems to ads serving. In the world of ride sharing we use Machine Learning to make a lot of decisions in realtime, for example: supply/demand curves are used to get an accurate ETA(estimated time of arrival) and...
Deep Learning @Google Scale: Smart Reply in Inbox
Anjuli will describe the algorithmic, scaling and deployment considerations involved in an extremely prominent application of cutting-edge deep learning in a user-facing product: the Smart Reply feature of Google Inbox.
Models in Minutes not Months: AI as Microservices
Companies are redefining their businesses by building models and learning from data. Whether it is using data science to predict their best sales and marketing targets, automating digital customer interactions using bots, or reducing waste in logistics and manufacturing - Artificial Intelligence...
Applying AI/ML for Trusted Commerce Connections @Facebook Marketplace
Facebook Marketplace is aimed at making buying and selling seamless for people locally within their communities and open up economic opportunity through social commerce. Given that Trust is a key driver of consumer decisions in Commerce, it is important for Facebook to build trust amongst buyers...
Interviews
Scaling Facebook Live Videos to a Billion Users
QCon: What is your role at Facebook today, and what are the types of problems you’re focused on?
I’m currently working on the backend for Facebook Live, Facebook Video, and Facebook Messenger. Most recently. I’ve been spending a lot of time on scaling the Facebook Live stack. Facebook Live let’s anybody broadcast across the world using just the camera in their pocket. What this means (in real terms) is the backend has to be...
Read Full InterviewConsensual Software: Prioritizing Trust & Safety
What makes trust and safety important?
Trust and safety is about keeping users safe. Online harassment is unfortunately a reality. When you are part of a community and online space you should be able to connect with one another and work together safe and be productive. My team at Github builds community management tools and features to discourage destructive behavior.
Read Full InterviewBlockchain Introduction: Peering Through the Hype
QCon: What are smart contracts?
We use smart contracts as computer executable code that performs the tasks and provisions that would be described in a real world legal contract. The intention is that it runs in an auditable place to ensure the integrity of this software contract.
Read Full InterviewScaling Instagram Infrastructure
QCon: What are the main problems you are focused on today?
Lisa: I am a software engineer on the Instagram Infrastructure Team. Our team’s main purpose is to keep the scalability of our systems up. While doing that, we identify both short term and long term fixes around scale. Additionally, we work closely with many other teams on the product side to help them to identify bottlenecks and...
Read Full InterviewScaling Uber's Elasticsearch Clusters
How you you describe the persona and level of the target audience?
The target audience are software engineers or SREs who are interested in scaling out Elasticsearch for OLAP workload. The audience should have basic understanding of Elasticsearch and OLAP.
Read Full InterviewSecurity Champions: Only YOU Can Prevent File Forgery
What is the focus of the work that you do today?
Right now I'm working at Synopsis on a team called Product Security, and the focus of our work is to increase the amount of security activities that the engineering team is doing for our products. Our goal is to make the most secure product possible and to increase the security mindset of our employees in the engineering department for...
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