Doing Some Good with Machine Learning

Lester Mackey

This is the story of my assorted attempts to do some good with machine learning. Through its telling, I’ll highlight several models of organizing social good efforts, describe half a dozen social good problems that would benefit from our community's attention, and present both resources and challenges for those looking to do some good with ML.

Panelists

Ricard Gavalda

Carla Gomes

Rashida Richardson

Speaker Bio

Lester Mackey is a machine learning researcher at Microsoft Research, where he develops new tools, models, and theory for large-scale learning tasks driven by applications from healthcare, climate, recommender systems, and the social good. Lester moved to Microsoft from Stanford University, where he was an assistant professor of Statistics and (by courtesy) of Computer Science. He earned his PhD in Computer Science and MA in Statistics from UC Berkeley and his BSE in Computer Science from Princeton University. He co-organized the second place team in the $1M Netflix Prize competition for collaborative filtering, won the $50K Prize4Life ALS disease progression prediction challenge, won prizes for temperature and precipitation forecasting in the yearlong real-time $800K Subseasonal Climate Forecast Rodeo, and received a best student paper award at the International Conference on Machine Learning.