Alex Smola is CEO and cofounder of Boson AI where he works on large AI models. Prior to that he was VP and Distinguished Scientist at Amazon Web Services responsible for AI/ML. He worked at CMU as Full Professor in the Machine Learning Department from 2013-2017 and he has taught at UC Berkeley, Stanford and the Australian National University. He also worked at Google, Yahoo Research and NICTA. He received his PhD in Machine Learning from the University of Technology in Berlin in 1998.

Alex has published over 300 papers on topics ranging from Kernel Methods to Statistical Testing, Bayesian Nonparametrics, Systems to Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing. He has written and edited 6 books, most recently his book entitled “Dive into Deep Learning”, which provides a hands-on introduction to AI.

Data & AI Leadership Day Talk:
Large Models for All and How To Adapt Them Efficiently

Foundation models have revolutionized ML, but using them remains a challenge. I’ll give an overview of such models and how to use them, both for mixed data in the context of AutoML and through fine-tuning and prompting, as is commonly done in Large Language Models.

In particular, AutoGluon allows users to integrate tabular data with representations for different data types, including text and images. I’ll discuss how this can be accomplished efficiently, taking advantage of the latest models available on public repositories, as well as how to adapt pure language models.