The trials of machine learning at Zendesk
Simply building a successful machine learning product is extremely challenging, and just as much effort is needed to turn that model into a customer-facing product. Drawing on their experience working on Zendesk's article recommendation product, Wai Yau and Jeffrey Theobald discuss design challenges and real-world problems you may encounter when building a machine learning product at scale.
| Talk Title | The trials of machine learning at Zendesk |
| Speakers | Wai Chee Yau (Zendesk), Jeffrey Theobald (Zendesk) |
| Conference | Strata + Hadoop World |
| Conf Tag | Make Data Work |
| Location | Singapore |
| Date | December 6-8, 2016 |
| URL | Talk Page |
| Slides | Talk Slides |
| Video | |
Simply building a successful machine learning product is extremely challenging, and just as much effort is needed to turn that model into a customer-facing product. Drawing on their experience working on Zendesk’s article recommendation product, Wai Yau and Jeffrey Theobald discuss design challenges and real-world problems you may encounter when building a machine learning product at scale. Wai and Jeffrey cover the evolution of the machine learning system, from individual models per customer (using Hadoop to aggregate the training data) to a universal deep learning model for all customers using TensorFlow, and outline some challenges they faced while building the infrastructure to serve TensorFlow models. They also explore the complexities of seamlessly upgrading to a new version of the model and detail the architecture that handles the constantly changing collection of articles that feed into the recommendation engine. Topics include:
