Keynote by Charles Sutton: Towards Semi-Automated Machine Learning

The practical work of deploying a machine learning system is dominated by issues outside of training a model: data preparation, data cleaning, understanding the data set, debugging models, and so on. What does it mean to apply ML to this “grunt work” of machine learning and data science? I will describe first steps towards tools in these directions, based on the idea of semi-automating ML: using unsupervised learning to find patterns in the data that can be used to guide data analysts. I will also describe a new notebook system for pulling these tools together: if we augment Jupyter-style notebooks with data-flow and provenance information, this enables a new class of data-aware notebooks which are much more natural for data manipulation.