// Abstract:

How my experience in quant finance and software engineering influenced how we ran ML at a London Fintech Startup. How to solve business problems with incremental ML? What's the difference between academic and industrial ML?

// Bio:

Laszlo worked as a quant researcher at multiple investment managers and as a DS at the world's largest mobile gaming company. As Head of Data Science at Arkera, he drove the company's data strategy delivering solutions to Tier 1 investment banks and hedge funds. He currently runs Hypergolic (hypergolic.co.uk) an ML Consulting company helping startups and enterprises bring the maximum out of their data and ML operations.

// Takeaways

Continuous evaluation and monitoring is indistinguishable in a well set up product team. Separation of concerns (SE, ML, DevOps, MLOps) is very important for smooth operation, low friction team coordination/communication is key.

To be able to iterate business features into models you need a modelling framework that can express these which is usually a DL package.

DS-es are well motivated to go more technical because they see the rewards of it. All well run (from DS perspective) startups in my experience do the same.

// Other Links

Free eBook about MLPM: https://machinelearningproductmanual.com/

Lightweight MLOps Python package: https://hypergol.ml/

Blog: laszlo.substack.com

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Timestamps:

[00:00] Introduction to Laszlo Sranger

[02:15] Laszlo's Background

[09:18] Being a Quant, then influenced, what you were doing with the Investment Banks?

[12:24] Do you think this can be applied in different use cases or specific to what you are doing?

[14:41] Do you have any thoughts of a potentially highly opinionated person?

[16:54] Product management in Machine Learning

[24:59] You have to be at a large company or you have to have a large team? [26:38] What are your thoughts on MLOps products helping with product management for ML? Is it an overreach or scope creep?

[32:00] In the messy world of startups due to the big cost of an MVP for NLP is RegEx which means to user feedbacks it's incorporated by tweaking RegEx?

[33:04] Does the ensemble recent models more than older models? If so, what is the decay rate of weights for older models?

[35:40] Since the iterative management model is generic enough for most ML projects, which component of it can be easily generalized and tools built for version control?

[36:38] Topic Extraction: What type of model do you train for that task?

[52:55] Thoughts on Notebooks

[53:34] "I don't hate notebooks. Let's be clear about that. I put it this way, notebooks are whiteboards. You don't want your whiteboards to be your output because it's a sketch of your solution. You want the purest solution."